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Will linux have DRM in the future? Maybe. It could be mandated by law, or some other dirty trick.

The bad side is that it will happen in the future. The reason may not be the DRM or DMCA staff, but a patent lawsuit that will outlaw use of something under Linux, unless done as the patent holders intend it to be used.

The good part is that it won't happen in the EU. I will be able to use my European Linux distro, with all the non-US packages. This situation is not so far fetched. For example mplayer is illegal in the US, and distributed only by non-US distros. And not to forget the Penguin Liberation Front which is dedicated for all the outlawed packages...

The bottom line is that users in the US are already legally allowed to use only a crippled version of Linux. But on the other hand, I'm not living in the US :-)

Given that the video is in Windows Media Video format, and that everybody at Slashdot is supposed to run a unix of some kind (Linux, OS X, etc), how are we supposed to watch this? Why don't we see more H.264 videos? KILL WMV AND RM! KILL THEM! WITH A CHAIR!

I watched it, and I'm using Fedora Core 3. I'm using MPlayer with win32 binary codecs. Check it out here.

It's clear that RMS feels that in some cases it is better to use the GPL than the LGPL.

I think RMS would say the GPL is preferable in the vast majority of cases. Else why would he urge developers -- in bold letters -- to release their libraries under the GPL?

But getting back to the topic of this thread: should GNOME's multimedia backend be licensed under the weak LGPL, when we know that the entertainment cartel has been one of the most vocal advocates of Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing?

Preventing users from skipping computers
Controlling your computer over the internet with rootkits
Instilling fear by suing innocent people
Suing independent competitors out of business
Bullying witnesses into perjury
and the list goes on...

The answer is absolutely no, and I daresay the FSF is of the same opinion, since they will include anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3.

Developers of Free and Open Source Software should use every legal tool at their disposal to protect the users' freedom. One of the best tools is to license music and video apps under the GPL, so that the entertainment cartel can't poison their hard work with draconian DRM. Otherwise, the developers might as well be working for the RIAA and MPAA!

Open Source developers who care about the users' freedom should help out multimedia projects that are licensed GPL (such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN).

Ever since a company called Fluendo joined the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board, GNOME is obligated to use GStreamer (a software product sponsored by Fluendo) as its audio and video backend. This wouldn't be bad, if it weren't for the fact that GStreamer uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to handcuff users and leave them at the mercy of the entertainment cartel. In order to do this, GStreamer is denying its developers the right to license their constribution under the GPL, so that Fluendo can sell closed-source, proprietary DRM plugins that let the MPAA and RIAA control the users' viewing habits.

GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from mature mutimedia projects such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN, all of which were started before GStreamer and all of which have strong copyleft protection by being licensed under the GPL. In other words, GStreamer further fragmented the Linux multimedia developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.

Ximian, a company instrumental in founding GNOME, sold out to big business in 2002 by switching Mono's license from the GPL to the weaker MIT X11 license. Instead of helping out the myriad of established multimedia apps such as Kaffeine, AmaroK, and KMPlayer, Ximian started a whole new app called Banshee, whose only claim to fame is that its license (MIT X11) allows linking to proprietary DRM plugins.

These are just some example of an increasing problem GNOME is experiencing: it is pandering (and in some cases outright selling out) to companies that don't necessarily have the users' best interest in mind. One can say that the whole reason GNOME was started was to allow proprietary software (including draconian DRM) to use the hard work of open source developers.

KDE, on the other hand, is licensed solely under the GPL because the toolkit it is based on (Qt) is also GPL. KDE is also committed to preventing DRM from infesting their user's computers: for KDE4, they are building a multimedia framework called Phonon that does not depend on GStreamer, but which can use any number of backends, including DRM-free ones.

If I'm not mistaken, mencoder, from the mplayer project, can do this. The program is quite dense in its options, and requires some getting used to, but it can do quite a lot.

Xvid files can be put on any storage device/media! Furthermore, they have a greater reaching compatibility: you can play them on Linux, Mac, Windows, and many DVD players. If a device doesn't support your Xvid file, there are free tools (mencoder) available that let you re-encode it into almost any other format and codec.

The unfortunate part is that you can't buy these superior Xvid files, because none of the companies that sell TV shows are willing to sell such a great product. Luckily, "torrent sites" have filled the gap in the market. They're against the law (assuming copyrighted content, that is...), but superior.

Sorry for being offtopic, but Mplayer will play any video codec you will ever find, out of the "box". You can compile it on OS X, Linux, *BSD, and even Cygwin under windows. It plays WMV better than Windows media player plays WMV, as well as encrypted DVDs, etc.

XBMC is under the GPL, it's based on MPlayer, it's unlikely we will ever see any GPL software on a MS console without modding. IF Sony does allow Linux on the PS3, then you can expect to see some great media players for the PS3.

XBMC is freaking awesome.

There are several free Linux software projects which might or might not what you are looking for. The first thing that comes to mind is something called ZoneMinder which, if I am not mistaken, is a Linux home security sytem which uses remote wireless Internet cameras.

Then there is also the well known Myth TV project which among other things is mainly used by people who bouild their own Personal Video Recorders(PVR). Myth TV supports both HDTV, NTFS and possbly also some other video broadcast standards.

A third possiblility that comes to mind is VLC which is a cross-platform media player and streaming server.

And then there are various other video related programs for Linux such as TvTime the televison application, or MPlayer the movie player. Concievably even something like the Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeNetMeeting) might be relevant. Ekiga supports Full-Screen Videoconferencing. Ekiga supports Video4Linux and Firewire Cameras Support through plugins.

Many Linux video projects seem to be built building block fashion, using other previously written free Linux software, as dependencies. In many cases there are also various other free video projects which are sometimes just user friendly front ends for other free video software. I could not even begin to list all of those free Linux software projects for video and other things.

By the way, Linux has never had virus problems but, even so, there are free anti-virus programs available for Linux. The one that I use is Clam Anti-virus. There are also several good free firewalls avilable for Linux which allow you to control which IP ports are open or closed. There is one other interesting video project which is interesting but, probably not what you are looking for is the free movie studio in a Linux box.

I hope that something that I mentioned might be usesful. You can then decide if Linux is really what you want or not. I personally like it anyway.

Considering advertisements have basically taught me never to trust them, not much would change without them, except my favorite TV shows would be on 33% longer, the internet would be safer to surf (well, assuming haven't already migrated away from IE), etc, etc.

Word of mouth is a perfectly good method. I've downloaded more than a few programs because people have recommended them to me. Firefox and Thunderbird. OpenOffice. Linux (not quite yet, too lazy to partition, but I'm getting there). mplayer. Apache Web Server. MySQL. The list goes on... granted, these are all free software packages I've mentioned, but then again I usually don't see ads for them anyways. :)

If anyone knows how to download it and convert it please tell me, I would love to have a copy of it localy.

It should be trivial in mplayer, although I'm not at home so I can't try it with your particular stream. I just recently did the same thing with another realmedia stream. You need a *little* command-line knowledge though. Get mplayer for your platform (Windows, Linux etc.), and also download the "essential codec pack" for your system [warning: not legal in many countries, since it includes binary codecs for real player and other proprietary formats]. Once you have done that, so it is capable of decoding realmedia streams, enter at the command line one of the following.

To output a realmedia stream to the current directory:
mplayer -dumpstream "http://[address]"

To output an uncompressed WAV file [warning: very large] to the current directory, for easier converting to mp3 or format of choice:
mplayer -ao pcm "http://[address]"
(You can also do this command to the saved realplayer stream with mplayer -ao pcm [stream_filename]).

If it can't connect to the stream, try saving the .rm file to disk and viewing it as text, and copy the rtsp://[address] link from the file to use directly on the command line instead of the other http:/// address. In your case, the link is "rtsp://152.3.208.146:554/spring06/cspd/01232006.r m?cloakport=80,554,7070".

If mplayer can play it, then it can save it. There are even mplayer plugins for Firefox that will play streaming media in-browser and also automatically save it all for you, although I haven't had the best of luck configuring those properly on my Linux system, and I am content doing it manually using the command-line method above.

Q. What players currently support Theora?
Major players like mplayer, xine, helix player and VideoLAN supports Theora. Directshow filters are also available for use on Windows platform.

1. install mplayer
2. install mplayer plugin
3. enjoy cnn videos.

this is the simple version....you might need to compile mplayer with different codecs for it to work....i use gentoo so its as easy as emerging mplayerplug-in for me

Noone is forcing anything on you. DRM plugins will be in the "ugly" module.

The whole reason why GStreamer started was to create a framework that would enable these "ugly" DRM plugins. GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from much more mature projects like Xine, MPlayer, and VLC. In other words, they further fragmented the developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.

Of course, they've tried to sugar coat this in order to attract developers (heck, their propaganda machine is quite good) but the fact remains that GStreamer is technologically inferior to Xine even now (Xine has a much cleaner, light-weight, robust API than GStreamer can hope to achieve in a long time).

In some of the cases, a choice of different engines for use is provided. Sometimes, a change in an engine will crash the app! And there is no easy way to know this choice even exists.

I particularily appreciate the folks at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ for a job well done.

But again, I fine Linux feels heavy, even on an AMD 2800+ Sempron processor with 512MB of RAM. On the other OS, it's all a snap.

Can someone tell me why http://www.vorbis.com/ is still not that popular?

While I will probably never use their tools, I believe that choice in C++ compilers is actually very good.

Remember what happened in RedHat GCC 2.96 case: An upgraded computer with "better" standards support actually resulted in more problems. Many source codes with GCC specific assumptions ceased to compile (inluding the Linux kernel) and everybody blamed RedHat. (Please do not start a flamewar about this).

But if we already had many vendors (like gcc, Intel, watcom), we'd be less likely to run into such problems.

If you want to save this file run this command: mplayer -dumpstream mms://edge.channel4.com/theitcrowd/episode1_c4web. wmv It requires http://mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer

VLC and MPlayer are the primary media players that have the wizardly bits to make use of windows binary codecs, and perhaps we'll see some of that same wizardry applied to MacOS X on Intel sometime soon, but there are no true cross-platform solutions to playing windows media files.

Well, there's WMP 9 for OS X. It is a Microsoft product, though.

Setting up WMA in MPlayer doesn't look difficult at all as long as you're running on x86.

This is actually a huge upgrade and great news for Mac users.

Try using MPlayer there is a version for windows available, I am posting the link here http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.htm l , download from the windows releasess choose the mirror nearest to you, or anyone that works.

You can also go here:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.htm l

and download the essential codecs package.

Un-bunzip it and copy the contents of the resulting folder into /usr/lib/win32 (you may have to create it depending on your distro) and all of a sudden you can play wmp files in mplayer and several other media palyers on Linux (not encoded ones but DVD Jon's got a fix for that i hear).

If you put mozilla and mozplugger on you can then play embedded media (make sure that konqueror is set for the plugins dirs).

Sadly, the BBC is still using closed formats but they do have a fully open audio/video codec in development that they will hopefully use in future.

BTW No, I don't work for the BBC but they are one of the few organisations in Britain worth caring about.

Dude, mplayer is your friend. It is capable of using native Win32 codecs (included on many sites as a tarball) and it will play just about any format known to man. There are also plugins for Firefox which allow you to start mplayer by clicking on them funky Windows Media Player "only" links.

*Official* Microsoft Windows Media Player for Mac: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/soft ware/Macintosh/osx/default.aspx

MPlayer with Microsoft wmv Codec Packs: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

So, uh, which operating system were you complaining about not being able to watch Media Player files on? And yes, Microsoft *does* have a better track record than Sony with respect to DRM. It is in their best interest. They are an operating system manufacturer, not a digital media provider. (for the most part) (we've been over this before... I have references, at home, but I'm at work...)

-everphilski-

Yeah exactly, and also the fact was that it helped people as well. I mean, honestly who want's to spend hours looking for some lyrics just for one song?

The meaning of these nice little programs is to help people be more creative and to work pro-actively with them to do that.

Other programs such as mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.htm l) let you watch loads of movies with lots of codecs and such, if ANYTHING this program would hinder the music industry more so than pearlyrics, my guess is that it's because pearlyrics was made primarily for Mac OS X (therefore was taken more notice of as Mac OS X is more popular than the primarily linux based mplayer), and that it simply looked for musical lyrics, are some of the reasons why it got taken notice of more, and therefore censored. It's unfair, and I think that these programs should, if anything, be helped by music industry heavyweights to do more things and increase their functionality!

Well at least the company apologised, I just wish they'd seen sense in the first place, before it was too late :).

I don't know about you but I'd rather have Windows Media Player than RealPlayer or Quicktime installed by default.

Well, I don't know about you - but I would much rather have mplayer, Zoomplayer or Classic Media Player installed by default then Windows Media Player

The point here is currently only one entity can decide.

"must include links to competitors"

It's cool if it means that Micro$oft will include links to Mplayer and Psi accordingly!

Granted I run 32-bit systems, and neglected to mention that codecs were required, but I've had very few difficulty getting aforementioned players to play WMV with binary codecs.

In fact, these days, I don't recall xine/mplayer ever not working out of the box from most package-manager-built installs.

For the sake of completeness, though, here are links to the binary codecs:

win32 codecs (avi/wmv/wma)

1. mplayer

2. xine

Not that tough, really, now is it?

Oddly enough, anymore I prefer mplayer under Linux to WMP on Windows. It's finally getting easier to get all the codecs for that application than it is for WMP. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

I had the same problem when trying to use ffmpeg CVS. I had previously used a patch build based on that mobilhackerz version, but wanted to get CVS to work

The ffmpeg IRC channel on freenode was no help, plenty of idlers but no one actually there. (Lots of open source projects channels are really empty even if they have hordes of people in them)

The ffmpeg user list was no help

The fix was on the ffmpeg devel list. I normally don't read dev stuff because I can't program my way out of a paper bag, I'm not a coder. But I was desperate.

http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2005-Se ptember/003948.html

I had to apply it manually, it's not "patch" ready it seems, but it works. Still no h.264 AVC support and it seems the singlejpeg thumbnail opton is gone.

The ffmpeg user documentation sucks.

Concerning keyboard shortcuts and MPlayer:
man mplayer and it's right near the top.
Or look at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html
Might be that some things in this one aren't correct for your version though.
Anyway why is hitting the keyboard wildly to find out what the keys do more difficult than hangling through hundreds of menus and submenus? Guess it's a question of personal preference, and with OpenSource projects you often have to live with the preferences of the developers.

I'm using mplayer windows binaries with all the non-free DLL codecs, it plays everything I throw at it. It's fast, stable, and I can use same thing under windows I do use under linux.

You should try it too. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

--Coder

mplayer does that just fine, thank you.

I just recently decided to finally get WMP version 9 movies to play in Firefox 1.5. Steps:

1. Download http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/a ll-20050412.tar.bz2
2. Untar in /usr/lib/codecs/
3. Create a /usr/lib/win32/ symlink to /usr/lib/codecs/
4. Install the mplayer plugin. I used mplayerplugin-3.11-1mdk.i586.rpm on Mandriva 2006.0. Project page appears to be http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/
5. Create symlinks in the firefox/plugins/ directory for the libraries in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
6. Launch Firefox and test your page with an embedded video

I am able to view all videos tested on several sites so far.

I never had much luck playing most videos in windows until I downloaded the ACE mega codecs package off a DC++ user. Its a nasty hack but once its installed you could play almost every format ever conceived.

I wish there was a linux equivalent.

In my experience (as a recent convert to FreeBSD+KDE for my main desktop) the video codecs available are a little immature and just need some polishing. They remind me of what it was like watching videos on windows about 4-5 years ago. That is to say it can be hit and miss quality wise. Codecs in windows are pretty bullet proof now, and even poorly encoded videos display quite well.

For video I use vlc and mplayer...its my experience that if of those programs can't handle a video very well, the other one will. They even play obscure formats like matrosky or whatever its called. Also, the mplayer mozilla plugin works beautifully for me.

For audio check out BMP (beep media player, based on xmms but uses gtk2 instead of 1.2) or audacious (which is a new fork of bmp now that bmp development is dead.) These programs are a decent reproduction of the winamp interface, and even support most types of streaming. The only type of streams I haven't been able to get to work are certain asx encapsulated wma streams, and I think thats cause of some drm bullshit.

Some ppl get a hardon when they talk about amarok for audio, but I tried it and didn't care for it. An audio player shouldn't bring a p4 to its knees, but thats what amarok did to me. Too bad because it looked pretty good from what I read.

how about you just use mplayer which CAN play pal and ntsc :)

Blade Encoder comes to mind.
MPlayer is at stake as well.

One thing I doubt a bit is DVD viewing on a P-III, especially the lower-clocked ones. I tried VLC on a P-III 800MHz and that's almost impossible.

Live555 use to have live.com. They make various bits of streaming media software. They have a library that's used in compiling MPlayer with stream playing support. I wondered why they changed. I thought it was some silly bit of corporate branding, but I guess MS made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

dude... get mplayer

If this is the same Joe Barr who can't even install and use MPlayer, do I really give a shit about what he thinks about Slack? I mean if he can call the best video player ever "The Project From Hell", he's just proven himself to be entirely unreliable.

Mplayer is available for a multitude of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and *nix. In fact my girlfriend uses mplayer and mplayer only on her Mac OS X due to Quicktime being unable to play a large amount of movies.
Of course if you want dvd playback you will need libdvdcss, libdvdread, etc.
Get mplayer here.

there are players like (my fav) Mplayer and Xine that can view files with the WMV codec..

If you never heard of mplayer i suggest you check it out.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ both Win32 and Linux version

The linux players work fine. I use MPlayer which will let me just watch one track of the DVD, without having to mess about with menus at all. I've never watched the FBI warning crap since I started to use it.
The firmware in my DVDROM driver is supposed to be region-locked, but I've never found a DVD that won't play.

Trust is no longer something that comes naturally to people anymore. In the old days - my old days and I'm only 29 years old - trust was assumed to exist between people. The fall of the Wall in '89 has effectivly put a slow stop to that with the international political and military bullying the US has put into the world (another storie for some other time). Most western countries have adopted a lot of "the american way" including the law-passing spirit. The patent laws are almost just as stupid and non friendly for the consomer as DRM et.al.

It used to be implied what was and what was not illegal in some ares that were gowernd by some very large, broad and non specific law and rules, but now everything has been put into law, and enforced by EOLA's and licenses when a product is bought by a consumer.
It is no longer the consumer that controls the market, it's the big coorporations that are able to push for the most non-liberal and conservative laws that will only help them on the "free market" that they create and control through the money flow to the politicians.

If the implementations of DRM can be cracked then they will and people will do just that, just like everybody runing a pirate version of M$ Windows... which M$ is very aware of, since that particular pirazy, for them, is not hurting them, just the opposite. Perhaps there is one good thing with DRM... it will prevent pirazy of windows and allow non M$ OS'es to be more dominant on the market... perhaps my favorite :-)

When it comes to stupid laws, the US rules. When it comes to what consumers want we will have to wait until consumers get so tired of big coorporatios that civilization will revert to the 1900's and start using the head instead of a keyboard. IMHO that will happen of we will get a world like Brazil, Blade Runner or The Fifth Element... large cooprorations that control the world.

IMHO DRM is evil, just like stupidity, taxes, and religion (in what ever order).

And just FYI, there is a very good and versatile media player (DVD, vmw, mpegN etc.) for non M$ OS'es - it's called mplayer... there is even a DVD-player with mplayer inside - even though they don't comply with mplayer's license, but that is another story, IIRC it's called KISS or something like that.

Not to troll or anything, but I like my program to be able to go fullscreen without having to spend $30 or whatever on a license, thank you very much.

My favourites? mplayer, VLC, XMMS (although XMMS2 is much-needed)

You can still pirate music and movies for playing on Linux. Arrr!

mplayer

I've been using free-software only for about 10 years now...the freedom and power that gives me is far more valuable than an hour and a half of the latest car crash scenes.

Umm.... MPlayer, Xine, or Ogle, with libdvdread and libdvdcss work fine under Linux to play any and every DVD I've ever tried.

http://mplayerhq.hu/