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The only real solution is a usable windows port of xine-lib or mplayer

Worked out of the box for me.

--grendel drago

Darn! Should have used the preview. :)


Official Homepage:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/



Unofficial Win32 binaries + installers and/or GUI's:

http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/

http://csant.info/mplayer.htm

http://deje.uw.hu/

http://mplayer.sunset-utopia.homeip.net/

http://mplayerc.uw.hu/

http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php

I've been working on BlogMatrix Sparks! for the last few months and it's definitely what this person is looking for:

• it's open source
• can record most -- every one I've seen -- streaming radio formats (including Windows Media and Real Player)
• it runs as a native (GUI) app on Windows and Mac and (in the works) as a Python app on Linux
• it converts recorded programs into MP3s
• MP3s are optionally treated as Podcasts and stored in iTunes or Windows Media Player
• there's a searchable directory of thousands of radio stations. This is really important as many radio stations try to hide their recording URIs
• radio can be recorded now, once only at a particular time or on a repeating basis (i.e. weekly)
• programming information is encoded into URI fragments to allow programming to be shared amongst multiple users
• here's some (old) screenshots

Credit where credit is due: this is an integration project on top of MPlayer and Lame. Ongoing project news is in our blog.

- David Janes

For that matter, mplayer with FIFOs and a little CGI may make an adequate ad-hoc solution, though I suspect real-time MP3 encoding is a lot trickier, and a package designed for that might be a good idea.

Right here.

"Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in MPlayer by iDEFENSE, and more were found by us while reviewing the code"
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

"New xine-lib released. This version adress multiple security vulnerabilites on PNM and Real RTSP clients. All users are advised to upgrade to 1-rc8. The release also includes several bug fixes and new features"
http://xinehq.de/

HUH??!! Obviously you've never used MPlayer before. Show me one player, under Windows that will play Quicktime, RealMedia, RTSP, DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs, any type of AVI, Mastroka, OMG, MP3, MP4, AAC, ... Shall I go on? You would need a handful of programs under Windows to do all of them. Oh and don't forget you can use it to encode any format to any other format as well.

"MPlayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other Unices, and non-x86 CPUs, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies, too (without the avifile library)."

I have personally used it on my Powerbood and it runs great. Sounds good? You can download it from here

There's nothing I enjoy more than paying money to rent a movie and sitting through 15 minutes of advertisements because the DVD won't allow the player to skip forward through that crap

I like idea of BluRay, 55Gb on single disk would be good for archivial of data.

Actually, Quicktime definitely does do fullscreen. What doesn't is the free version of Apple's Quicktime player - though for $25 US you get fullscreen and a lot more handy features.

There are many free alternatives though -- such as, but not limited to MPlayer and VideoLAN which are two very fine players.

As far as missing applications, I've had yet to be unable to find alternatives to what I use in the PC world, so without further specific examples, you won't get much help. In fact, even if there is a program only available for PC, VirtualPC or Remote Desktop Connection Client solves that problem completely for me.

I've always used Win and Mac OS (since Win3.1 and OS 7 anyway) and the only major annoyance on the OS X side is when I keep hitting CONTROL+C to copy on my Mac after working on the Windows box for prolonged periods of time.

I won't even bother to list all my annoyances with Windows :) ... IMO, it just feels like a clumsy OS in comparison.

Hasn't this been possible all along, with MPlayer? Their codec status table lists "Windows Media Video 9 DMO" as working. Is that not the same thing as the WMV9 referred to here?

Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead and then use mplayer or xine or totem to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer to build a custom app pretty quickly that sent 3 separate video streams to 3 different monitors and kept everything synchronized with a single point of control.

You don't think mpg321 is lightweight enough for you? What about mplayer? It plays audio just fine.

The answer to the first question, taken literally, is "yes, obviously". Presuming you really mean "anyone" as a casual way of saying for "a very large portion of the general market" then the answer right now is "no". But...

Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?

This is a different question altogether, and the answer is "yes".

See, most people really DON'T care what OS brand name they use so much as they care about being able to play well with others - whether the "others" are other computer environments that the user is already familiar with, or other people playing the user's favorite game, or websites on the internet and email clients on their friend's computer, or being able to look at the slideshows that someone else produced and uploaded, or whatever...

Most people also don't want to blow wads of money on licensing if they don't have to.

The "typical" computer user these days seems to be interested almost entirely in email, web browsing, and "Mahjong" games. These basic functions are already well supported in *nix environments and ready to be sold as "appliances" running *nix to anyone who is satisfied with those basic requirements. Related to email and web, though, people also want to be able to watch all those little internet videos that their friends email to them, which are often in proprietary formats. Now, MPlayer already supports all of the major formats pretty well, and plugins are available to use it to play internet videos in Microsoft(r)'s formats, Apple(r) Quicktime(tm), and so forth, not to mention the existence of the Helix media player as well. So, that's possible to take care of.

The slideshows (I refuse to call it a "presentation" when there is nobody actually presenting...), word-processor documents, and spreadsheets can all be handled pretty well by OpenOffice. There are still a few formatting differences that come up sometimes when loading a file produced by a Microsoft(r) program, but I'd call it "good enough for typical home use". Plus, the ability to generate .pdf's natively built in means if someone is USING OpenOffice they can generate documents that look correct on everyone's computers. So, for ordinary home users, this is also at a "good enough" stage.

That's not all of the market, or I think even a majority, but it's a pretty big chunk. What's really missing, as the Slashdot discussion boards echo loudly with every time this subject comes up, is video games. Right now, most are written exclusively for the purpose of being installed on a Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) general-purpose operating system, and this does create a genuine speedbump in the path of *nix desktop marketshare.

However, the concept of having a dedicated "boot disk" for running a video game has been around for a very long time. Tech support people tend to love them, because when used, the video game in question ends up running on a known, well-characterized environment without other processes interfering. Because providing tech support costs money, software company tend to love anything that reduces the need for tech support.

Since it seems like most people who are playing anything more intensive than "Mahjong" or "Solitaire" usually play full-screen and dedicating all of their attention to the game (and generally want as little running in the background reducing their framerates as possible), the possibility of distributing videogames on self-contained boot CD's is very real. The boot disk might be a no-license-fee-paid-by-the-software-company Linux disk, as they've talked about doing (have already done?) with America's Army. I think the only technical capability lacking to make this really feasible is full write support for NTFS (since

Here is the current protocol implementation.

You start it up with -slave, and it's headless... connected via a pipe to your application.

Whoever is the first to wrap a good UI over Mplayer (So far all the guis have been buggy, less than optimal, or just generally sucks.)

Well, when looking at the above list, I can't help but be frustrated. The majority of those things are already available. Let's go down the list item by item:

Windows Network Neighborhood visibility and UNIX/Linux visibility in the same panel.

Huh? What are these people using, FVWM? With Samba it's easy to set up a Windows network on a Linux box that can be viewed on both GNOME and KDE. In the same place as Windows shares. GNOME (and probably KDE, not sure) can even display different manual networks, such as FTP servers in its network place.

Active Directory password management which includes single sign-on and password expiration policies.

Can't comment on this, I'm not familiar with Active Directory.

Interoperability with Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000.

Am I completely crazy, or can't Ximian Connector & Evolution already do this?

Font compatibility with Microsoft Office and Openoffice.org and/or StarOffice.

Again, I ask the same question -- "huh?" -- if you want to use the Microsoft core fonts, install them! It's not that hard. It's not a fault of OpenOffice.org or StarOffice, it's just a case of the fonts that come on a Linux distro by default -- there's not Arial, Times New Roman, etc. because those are Microsoft fonts and Linux distributors can't distribute them. Might I ask a daring question: why don't Windows users install the Bitstream Vera fonts? I find it annoying that "Microsoft Office" doesn't have compatibility with "OpenOffice.org" (even though the office suites are not the problem in the first place).

Windows Terminal Server clients using RDP out of the box for home grown applications and special Windows applications.

Again, excuse my ignorance, but ... what's wrong with VNC? Why not switch to an open solution?

Ability to click on a file in a Windows or Samba share and initiate the associated application.

I don't agree that that's the problem: KDE (and GNOME maybe, I'm not sure though) can open the desired application just like normal but it does it in an undesirable way, IMHO -- it doesn't open the file from where it is, it copies it to your home directory and opens it from there. I think that that should be improved.

Device management for hardware compatibility.

That's very vague. Do they mean a GUI? If so, what's wrong with distro-specific hardware GUIs such as YaST (which is very good IMHO). A universal distro-independent solution is not a good idea, as is exemplified by LinuxConf. If you want a GUI for hardware management, pick a distro that has one.

Compatible Windows Media player Codecs.

That's the dumbest one yet, and the answer's right here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

Uh. I don't quite get your point. If it's running Linux, sure you can add support for OGG and the likes, but then again you can't play proprietary codecs such as WMA, WMV, QuickTime and others - unless you pay for the license. All this assuming that such a device would be aimed at the mainstream markets, of course.

Uh. I don't quite get your point. If it's running Linux, sure you can add support for OGG and the likes, but then again you can't play proprietary codecs such as WMA, WMV, QuickTime and others - unless you pay for the license. All this assuming that such a device would be aimed at the mainstream markets, of course.

I know that one option is to use the crossover plugin to play quicktime files in Linux. Does anyone know of another option to successfully play this quicktime trailer in Linux?

I've tried totem, xine, and mplayer on Mandrake 10.0. I haven't tried compiling my own copy of mplayer, but I have the codecs, and the output from mplayer makes me think that mplayer is using the quicktime codec. But I still just get a blue screen and no sound when I try to play it.

Thanks...

Downloaded with MiMMS and played with MPlayer. No Windows Media Player or Windows required.

Oh, and there shouldn't be a 't' in the protocol part of the URL:
mms://od-msn.msn.com/14/mbr/DTW_VirtualStuntman.wm v
(remove any spaces)

You don't have to. You *do* have to download this package, extract to /usr/local/lib/codecs/ and then rebuild mplayer as usual. Read this.

You don't have to. You *do* have to download this package, extract to /usr/local/lib/codecs/ and then rebuild mplayer as usual. Read this.

Bert, get MPlayer and the codecs.

PS. Don't forget the codecs, or you'll be recompiling again.

Mplayer...
Totally free. Totally open source. Works great.
Plays everything I stick in it..

I should know, this is my post. In hindsight, maybe I should've actually explained what I meant by those two examples.

The first, the one about the Debian machines being compromised was to show nothing is unbreakable (even though the Debian people made some mistakes in configuring those machines, their far from being responsible for that).
The second, the MPlayer one was to show that a clueless admin (Okay, I know I shouldn't call the MPlayer people names based on a single experience, but that's the impression I got from that thread.) matters more than the distribution he or she uses.

Well, http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2003 -December/022821.html is just one of the usual rants of mplayer against Debian. If you go further in this thread, you will find http://mhttp//mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-e ng/2003-December/022879.htmlplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ mplayer-dev-eng/2003-December/022877.html> and http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2003 -December/022879.html, which show that the admin didn't have a clue how his server was compromised (it must be the kernel and/or Debian, because he is a perfect admin, or what?).

Well, http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2003 -December/022821.html is just one of the usual rants of mplayer against Debian. If you go further in this thread, you will find http://mhttp//mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-e ng/2003-December/022879.htmlplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ mplayer-dev-eng/2003-December/022877.html> and http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2003 -December/022879.html, which show that the admin didn't have a clue how his server was compromised (it must be the kernel and/or Debian, because he is a perfect admin, or what?).

In Stable, the likelihood of an 0wn4ge is slim to none, in other words.
How about this, or this then?
No distribution is inherently more secure than another, a Debian Woody machine will be as easily compromised as any other distribution, if the admin is incompetent. (And, no, I'm not saying all machines are compromised because of incompetent admins)

I watch quicktime movies and trailers under Linux and BSD all the time, with Xine and the associated DLLs, available here. Life is good. There are instructions on how to get it working on Xine's website.

Does this help?

mplayer

Mplayer uses it too, there is also a Windows version

BTW, it is not libcss anymore, but libdvdcss.

Mplayer uses it too, there is also a Windows version

BTW, it is not libcss anymore, but libdvdcss.

how can I rip this to HD?

You can also dump the stream with mplayer, which is GPL. The windows port works fine for this although you have to use it from the commandline.

the command is something like:
mplayer -dumpstream -playlist http://domain/address/to/ram/file.ram

If you actually have the address of the .rm stream and not the ram container then you can skip the -playlist option. Should produce a file called stream.dump rename it and play it like a normal .rm.

I haven't seen the WMP stream at the BBc only the rm, I expect the process is the same.

I've been using the shareware version of NetTransport, which seems to work quite nicely

You can also dump the stream with mplayer, which is GPL. The windows port works fine for this although you have to use it from the commandline.

the command is something like:
mplayer -dumpstream -playlist http://domain/address/to/ram/file.ram

If you actually have the address of the .rm stream and not the ram container then you can skip the -playlist option. Should produce a file called stream.dump rename it and play it like a normal .rm.

There's no need to "fire up your horribly proprietary RealPlayer": mplayer can do it under Linux too, if built with the right codecs.

mplayer plays real quite well, but I get occasional segfaults :(

Towards an MPlayer Resolution. Diego Biurrun posted an update on the work being done to resolve MPlayer's licensing difficulties. The main two concerns have been the lack of a LICENSE file and noncompliance with clause 2a of the GNU General Public License, which Diego has attempted to address through a LICENSE file and a Copyright file. Don Armstrong thought it would suffice for Debian's purposes, but suggested that the MPlayer team should indicate in the relevant files that they've been changed and who changed them.

They were total assholes about distros distributing binaries of mplayer, as well as compiler problems- they're such bad coders, their shit broke faster than a piece of china near a bull, and they would happily point a finger anybody they could. "Oh, the software crashes because Redhat didn't build it properly". Or, "oh, you didn't compile it with this one specific version of GCC."

Mplayer's problems always seemed to be "mplayer crashes when built with anything but this version of GCC".

mencoder is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies to other MPlayer-playable formats. It encodes to DivX4, XviD, one of the libavcodec codecs and PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio in 1, 2 or 3 passes. Furthermore it has stream copying abilities, a powerful plugin system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate, scale, noise, rgb/yuv conversion) and more.

Who cares about mplayer support?

Those of us who prefer our keyboard to our mouse. And other folks.

It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.

You misconfigured it. This is, admittedly, not hard to do, but mplayer is the fastest of movie players if used correctly.

Try using the following command: mplayer -vo xv -fs=yes moviename.

Hmm, upon checking the manual, perhaps if Mac OS X lacks support for xv you should be using -vo quartz.

Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions. /me boggles.

You've got to be joking. What about the latest ChangeLog?

The user interface sucks, especially on OS X.

Actually, mplayer has some kind of bitmapped interface, which I always compile out. I hate all of those damned bitmapped interfaces, the pseudo-VCR things. It has a CLI interface which is exactly the same on OS X as on the other platforms.

I fully understand that for other people, other solutions are more appropriate, but I really prefer a dedicated ReplayTV unit right now, especially for the consistency and reliability, not to mention the cool remote, though I may roll my own when I eventually move to HD (there are no Replay HD or Replay+DVD offerings announced, and Tivo's HD is too encumbered out of the box for my needs).

Not to beat a not-dead-yet horse, but ReplayTV recently dumped a lot of their 5040 units for $50 each, or $30 with a special coupon code (the latter seems to have been a mistake that they cancelled quickly). These are previous-generation models that can transfer shows to other Replay units of the same 50xx model line, something Tivo has not been able to do natively, before, and which is unfortunately dropped in the 55xx line. The 50xx line also has the controversial commercial advance feature, which was dropped on the 55xx line for legal reasons(it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, but is nice when it works). With lifetime activation at $299 (or monthly fees that now vary depending on number of units), that means RTV is still a platform worth comparing against. Especially when you consider third-party tools like DVArchive (java-based!) that exploit the XML interface of the units to copy programs off for safekeeping and later streaming, without any hacking of the box or transcoding of the native .mpgs or weird versions of mplayer, unlike Tivos, again.

Oh, one more thing: people outside the US have managed to set up their legitimately-subscribed ReplayTVs with another tool called WIRNS (which you can find in AVSForum, to scrape local show listings. I mention this because, even if ReplayTV as a company dies, owners will still have alternatives to keep their schedules from going dark. And a lot of owners are also joining Poopli, a website with the objective of making transfers between Replays easier.

(No, I don't work for anybody making or selling these, nor do I own any of these websites. I'm just an owner of a 50xx that I've bumped up to 200GB with a simple patch-and-swap, very much like a Tivo owner would do. Before I bought my box, I had almost given up on tv entirely. Now, I'm looking forward to my next hard drive upgrade. And I really regret not buying another unit on sale).

I tried following the directions and wound up with jack.

Ahhh, you must have followed the wrong directions. Jack is a low-latency audio server, designed for professional audio work. Maybe you should consider KPlayer, the wonderful KDE frontend to mplayer?

mencoder

Moll.

The people at irc.freenode.net #mplayer for helping me play CSSed DVDs.

Ozkan and Khaled for working on a flash development environment for linux (F4L)

It's just MS's WMA format that iTunes can't play, but neither can any other player anyways.

That's not exactly true.

Why? On the Mplayer Download Page, they have all the codecs you will ever need. I have yet to run into an audio/video file I was not able to play in Linux with Mplayer. Just download the Mplayer coded DLL files and put them all in /usr/lib/win32, and now Xine, Totem and Mplayer will play _everything_ you throw at them.

I currently have a Treo 600. It's really been a great phone/pda. The camera's pictures aren't the best, but they're about what you'd expect from a phone-camera. I use it (together with my 512 mb SD card) as my mobile mp3 player using Pocket Tunes, and even use it to watch movies using MMPlayer and avi's specially encoded with mencoder thusly:

The only drawback has been the low-res screen (160px^2). I'd love to get a version with a 320x240 or something like that.

Is it M player? http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/

I use it on my main windows box and it's hassle free, plays 99% of files and I wouldn't change it for the world :)