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mplayer

Well, on Windows, there is probably no better player than Media Player Classic, which already can run Real stuff via Real Alternative. Also, mplayer is available for windows, though I've not tried playing Real with it outside Linux.

As for Real themselves, I kinda like what they are doing now, but old grudges die hard. I am torn between wanting to support people doing the right thing and feeling they haven't been punished nowhere near enough for past things yet.

For Windows users, just install the Kazaa Lite ++ Codec Pack. It's legal (unlike it's p2p software) and includes not only the latest DivX codecs, but quicktime/realplayer Dll's that operate without the quicktime/realplayer software. This means quicktime/realplayer playability and browser streaming without the spyware. They are known as quicktime/realplayer lite.

Get the 'mega codec pack' here:
http://g5.edskes.com/klmcodec103.exe

For linux users, of course head here and snag:
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/e ssential-20040704.tar.bz2

Which is the mplayer release of an essential codec pack containing divx, quicktime, realplayer, etc. Those should be extracted (without the sub director in the tar) to /usr/lib/win32

Quicktime and wma codecs for mplayer here.

Here

The original cast (unfortunately without the late Peter Jones), a cameo by Douglas Adams himself ..

And for those of you who aren't in the UK, you may appreciate knowing that Radio 4 make their programs available on their website for a week after the broadcast.

Unfortunately they're still in crappy real media format, but mplayer deals with them fine.

About time too :) - i've been looking forward to these for a long time, they were originally due to begin airing in February of this year but some licensing issues with the movie delayed that.

I hope I'm not the only one who caught this, but it appears the MEncoder version number used in the tests, 3.3.1 doesn't exist.

Anandtech page: http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2114&p=3
I've used mencoder a lot with Linux, and I know the latest version, other than the CVS, is 1.0pre4. When the version is custom compiled, it appends your gcc-version number to the end of the version, so it could become 1.0pre4-3.3.1.

MPlayer/MEncoder page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html
Curiously, the next page of the Anandtech article shows rendering tests with Mental Ray version 3.3.1.

Second Anandtech page:http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=211 4&p=4
Interesting! The very same version specified incorrectly for MEncoder! I think we may be dealing with a minor mistake in this article, though frankly, I can't imagine getting those kinds of speeds from MEncoder with decent quality and bitrate. My AMD Athlon XP 2100+ only gets 13 FPS, and I know that mencoder doesn't take advantage of the x86-64 instruction set.
Oh well, just thought I'd bring this to /.'s attention.

Rule of Modularity: the 'simple parts' are not so simple- take any linux distribution and type 'man ls' and see how long that is, it will work for anything substituted for ls, certainly not simple.

The unix philosophy is One tool does one task, and does it well. ls lists the contents of a directory. There are some options for sorting and selecting what information to show. But it's still just listing the contents of a directory. If ls also checked your email (jwz's rule) or something like that, you'd have a point. But you don't. You're just confusing options and complexity.

Rule of Composition: Most new linux apps are not desined to be connected (through a pipe) to anything else-- they are either programs written with curses or for X and that means that they are not connectable.

Don't confuse applications and tools. Apps are big monolithic programs like web browsers and media players. The little unix tools that populate /bin and /usr/bin are the things that are meant to be used with pipes and other shell constructs. It doesn't usually make sense to pipe the output of an app to much besides a log file.

And a pipe doesn't always have to be STDOUT or something. When working locally X11 goes through a pipe, a named pipe. DXPC, the Differential X Protocol Compressor, uses named pipes to send X11 messages to another host in an efficient compressed form. This program doesn't need to modify X or libx11 or anything else to do what it does. It's all through the magic of pipes!
(I originally thought SSH used the same method to forward+compress+encrypt X11 traffic, but it looks like it binds on local TCP ports instead)

Rule of Parsimony: use ls -l /path/to/program of ls -R /path/to/source and check the size column. Or check the man page. Or start the program and look. There are not many small linux programs- especially because of its open-source nature. Linux (kernel) itself is also pretty big,

Boy, you're not making much sense there. The linux kernel is actually pretty small. Most apps are quite a deal larger than the kernel. My 2.6.7 kernel here is 1.3M, compressed. My XFree86 4.3.0 X server is 1.7M. Mozilla is close to 20M. And ls, your previous "complex" example, is all of 71K. Apps are big, tools are small. On any OS. Simple.

It's called MPlayer. /rimshot

Check out the following philosophy of A'rpi ( http://mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news-archive. html ) when faced with the concept of Debian packaging mplayer without the codecs (which is what I'm assuming Redhat & company will be doing with Helix):

I think that including an unusable build of an application is even worse than not packaging it at all. It is not only valueless for the users (they will have to remove it and compile the source of the original version), but it gives the application a bad reputation, i.e. advertising it as a useless player being incapable of even playing a simple small file, or an unencrypted DVD (with AC3 sound)... Unfortunately most users won't notice the small comments in distribution specific files (like README.SuSE, or README.Debian) and will tell their friends, magazines (which occasionally write distro reviews) and post on portals/forums that it is a very bad, broken, unusable application.

... it will be interesting to see what happens with Helix payer, now that you have Redhat & Real (two public companies) trumpeting this as the big thiong fro linux desktop - will they throw in the non-gpl codecs so that everything dances perfectly, or will they ship only the shell & support for things like OGG, dissapointing linux converts used to their OS supporting more flavours of multimedia ... ?

We already have a GPL'd AV player: mplayer. If by "industry-standard" you mean "a lot of pointy-hairs like it", then we also have an "industry-standard" OS: Windows. In which case, why are we all using Linux?

Seeing is believing. That's MPlayer running through AAlib.

On a more serious note, here's Lynx and Links looking at SlashDot. Still quite useful. Not so special for seeing the latest from Cassini or Rutan, but more than enough for 95% of your browsing needs. Links can be compiled to (if run under X) display images.

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

I love it. It plays everything. On whatever.

Vim to edit text

Mutt for email

elinks to browse the web

MPlayer to play any media file (even videos in text mode)

mICQ for ICQ (also centericq for a multi-protocol IM client)

BitchX for IRC

lftp for ftp

Vim to edit text

Mutt for email

elinks to browse the web

MPlayer to play any media file (even videos in text mode)

mICQ for ICQ (also centericq for a multi-protocol IM client)

BitchX for IRC

lftp for ftp

In FFmpeg's CVS.

Debian doesn't include mplayer...but you can still download it from their website.

You're so right! What do you need X for, when you can even play color videos on a text console?

Now the only thing that's still missing is an aalib version of pornview, and the average user could use the computer just as well in text mode as in graphical mode. Plus, since he doesn't need a mouse anymore, he can use the right hand for other activities.

For example, something like "Add/Remove Programs" in windows

Package management isn't included with a normal copy of Microsoft(tm) Windows(r). Only if you buy the corporate admin pack to you get a package manager.

Another example would be a top-quality media playe

How can I get one of those for Windows(r)? It certainly doesn't include one. I wouldn't mind the somewhat gunky interface (needlessly non-rectangular border) of Microsoft Media Player, if it could actually open most AVI files.

But it can't. There are files mplayer reads fine, but Microsoft's player just says "Failed to download codec".

it is however against the license for someone like redhat/madrake/debian to provide binaries of various java implementations alongside SUN's in a distribution

Linux for Dummies? :-)

yes, but that assumes you already run your own build of java, which will not be supported, even minimally, by anyone but yourself.

Yes, of course -- how else can you find and fix a bug in the source code? As is the case with all changes to all products -- open source or not.

and it requires all your changes are released under the SUN license.

As is the case with the GNU licensing. BSD's is, of course, the most open, but you prefer GNU for some reason. Well, anyway, now this is dangerous territory...

if it were released as free software... then someone may be willing to at least "unofficially" support it.

Such decisions -- to support or not -- are based on political (not necesserily invalid), rather than technical reasons. For crying out loud -- mplayer (and the Linux-distros, that include it) supports a host of binary only Windows (!) DLLs -- because, presumably, of the author's dedication to building a versatile player, capable of playing all known encodings. Compared to this, supporting a piece of software, for which the source code is readily available is a cake-walk!

What it boils down to -- the source is freely (as in beer) available. For anyone, who wishes to tinker with it, investigate a suspected problem, understand a concept.

No one can distribute the modified sources, which is irrelevant, since the originals are always available from the Sun itself, and the modifications can be distributed separately.

To distribute binaries one needs to pay Sun (usually) and undergo extensive compatibility tests (which I can only welcome). If there is, indeed, a limitation to distributing other implementations -- FreeBSD shows, how to overcome with its usual understated grace.

As the /etc/motd says on freefall.FreeBSD.org:

Shut up and code!!!

it is however against the license for someone like redhat/madrake/debian to provide binaries of various java implementations alongside SUN's in a distribution

Linux for Dummies? :-)

yes, but that assumes you already run your own build of java, which will not be supported, even minimally, by anyone but yourself.

Yes, of course -- how else can you find and fix a bug in the source code? As is the case with all changes to all products -- open source or not.

and it requires all your changes are released under the SUN license.

As is the case with the GNU licensing. BSD's is, of course, the most open, but you prefer GNU for some reason. Well, anyway, now this is dangerous territory...

if it were released as free software... then someone may be willing to at least "unofficially" support it.

Such decisions -- to support or not -- are based on political (not necesserily invalid), rather than technical reasons. For crying out loud -- mplayer (and the Linux-distros, that include it) supports a host of binary only Windows (!) DLLs -- because, presumably, of the author's dedication to building a versatile player, capable of playing all known encodings. Compared to this, supporting a piece of software, for which the source code is readily available is a cake-walk!

What it boils down to -- the source is freely (as in beer) available. For anyone, who wishes to tinker with it, investigate a suspected problem, understand a concept.

No one can distribute the modified sources, which is irrelevant, since the originals are always available from the Sun itself, and the modifications can be distributed separately.

To distribute binaries one needs to pay Sun (usually) and undergo extensive compatibility tests (which I can only welcome). If there is, indeed, a limitation to distributing other implementations -- FreeBSD shows, how to overcome with its usual understated grace.

As the /etc/motd says on freefall.FreeBSD.org:

Shut up and code!!!

some of us have been using the win32 port of mplayer for a year now, it works great, just like on linux.

MPlayer for Win32
if anyone wants to check it out, also need the codec pack here , and there are some frontends on the projects page if you dont like the command line (or just set it to open movie files). also includes mencoder with xvid 1 and mp3lame encoding support.

drm not supported yet, and be sure to upgrade your mplayers! lots of new features from pre3 and LOTS more to come, faad 2 sync, color subs, check the wishlist to see whats wished/planned.

some of us have been using the win32 port of mplayer for a year now, it works great, just like on linux.

MPlayer for Win32
if anyone wants to check it out, also need the codec pack here , and there are some frontends on the projects page if you dont like the command line (or just set it to open movie files). also includes mencoder with xvid 1 and mp3lame encoding support.

drm not supported yet, and be sure to upgrade your mplayers! lots of new features from pre3 and LOTS more to come, faad 2 sync, color subs, check the wishlist to see whats wished/planned.

some of us have been using the win32 port of mplayer for a year now, it works great, just like on linux.

MPlayer for Win32
if anyone wants to check it out, also need the codec pack here , and there are some frontends on the projects page if you dont like the command line (or just set it to open movie files). also includes mencoder with xvid 1 and mp3lame encoding support.

drm not supported yet, and be sure to upgrade your mplayers! lots of new features from pre3 and LOTS more to come, faad 2 sync, color subs, check the wishlist to see whats wished/planned.

some of us have been using the win32 port of mplayer for a year now, it works great, just like on linux.

MPlayer for Win32
if anyone wants to check it out, also need the codec pack here , and there are some frontends on the projects page if you dont like the command line (or just set it to open movie files). also includes mencoder with xvid 1 and mp3lame encoding support.

drm not supported yet, and be sure to upgrade your mplayers! lots of new features from pre3 and LOTS more to come, faad 2 sync, color subs, check the wishlist to see whats wished/planned.

currently players: a. don't play incomplete avi at all b. can't rewind c. can reconstruct index on start (takes some time).

MPlayer does all three. I never bothered setting up TiVo-ish software: I just run mencoder to start recording and immediately run mplayer to play back the file as it's being written. I can pause for commercials and skip forwards and backwards.

Try MPlayer Here It's mainly intended for video but will work with audio as well. I'm not sure how well the windows version works, but on Linux I've found that it works flawlessly, playing things that all other players will choke on, though it will on rare occasions choke on a wmv file (maybe no support for newer or DRMed windows media files? any other slashdotters out there know).
I know there was a big deal awhile ago about some dvd player manufacturer using mplayer code in their software and not providing the source, and well my thinking is that if it's good enough for a video player manufacturer to steal than it should probably be good enough for the average geek ;)

The Zaurus is a tiny linux box. A powerful, tiny linux box. The first thing you should do when you get a Z is wipe the OS and instead install the excellent OpenZaurus (OZ). OZ is better than the original Linux install in nearly every respect. Don't think of your Z as a PDA, it's more like a tiny laptop. Some of the things I do with mine:

email: I recently compiled Mutt with a IMAP header cache patch. One of the most powerful email clients in the palm of my hand :-)

wireless sniffing: As you know, Kismet rules the land of wireless sniffers. Pop a wireless card in your Z (or get a 6000 :-) and your neighbours will never be safe again :-)

mp3/ogg playing: Using either Opie-Player2 or the excellent tkcplayer. Unfortunatly, I can't use the tkcplayer on the very latest version of OpenZaurus, not because it won't run (because it DOES almost start up when using "runcompat" but then tells me it can't run on this platform-- which it CAN otherwise it wouldn't be able to tell me that :-) TKC are you listening? Remove the check please :-)

Video playing: using a port of the best linux movie player mplayer. I've encoded a bunch of movies down to ~200MB with great results. You can pop a couple of these on a 512MB card for those long flights :-)

Coding: Of course, I've got gcc and perl loaded on the puppy. Hell, without perl I wouldn't be able to run Chaosreader, makes those long hotel stays much more interesting :-)

Exploit testing :-) Since perl and gcc work fine, I really haven't run into any common exploits I can't compile or run properly.

A couple of hints and tricks:

1) If you want to extend your battery life while doing things like mp3 playing or wardriving, grab something like Qoverclock and use it to UNDERCLOCK your Z. Turn down (or off) the display as well. Poke at it a bit and realize you can easily make a shell script to do without the GUI.

2) To maximize your space on root, ram, sd and cf, the single best thing to use is UCLX which works just like UPX. UCLX/UPX are executeable file compressors-- you compress your executable and when you run it it decompresses (to ram) on the fly. The compression it uses is AT LEAST as good as gzip (or better) and the decompression is very fast. When using slower media like SD (or even CF) you'll find that executables will run FASTER compressed then they would uncompressed-- the CPU can decompress much smaller exe faster than the much larger uncompressed exe could be loaded from media and run.

3) When choosing a root/ram disk size for OpenZaurus, it's a good idea to pick a small root with a much larger ram disk. If (when) you need more ram, you can simply make some ramdisk swap files.

4) While you can run gcc right on the Z, it's also nice to us a cross compiler on your (much faster) desktop and then just cp the binary over. If you're too lazy to do cross compiles (or don't want to set up a ton of additional packages like ncurses, etc), you can also just ssh into the IPAQ development cluster and compile your code there. Typically it will run without issue-- sometimes you may want/need to statically link your programs or just grab the libraries from the ipaq and throw 'em on your Z. I haven't found a single thing yet I couldn't get to run.

5) Assuming you grab the required libraries, you can run basically all of the sw in th

vlc halts playing any files for me (tested the last couple 7.x.x versions)

mplayer unfinished? mind naming some examples? http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-bet a/

also... vlc uses 20mb ram sitting there... mplayer 2-6mb for me

Rolling your own through a shell script shouldn't be hard. MPlayer supports grabbing video and compressing it on the fly (see link). So create 2 shell scripts, one to switch files for each camera (have an alpha and beta file), and one to backup the files to your favorite media. Then run a cron job. Every hour (or day) switch the files and do whatever you need with the files. It should even be possible to create redundant copies across the network, so you can keep a copy safe.

Rolling your own through a shell script shouldn't be hard. MPlayer supports grabbing video and compressing it on the fly (see link). So create 2 shell scripts, one to switch files for each camera (have an alpha and beta file), and one to backup the files to your favorite media. Then run a cron job. Every hour (or day) switch the files and do whatever you need with the files. It should even be possible to create redundant copies across the network, so you can keep a copy safe.

mplayer plugin plays whatever mplayer plays. and mplayer plays quicktimei have been watching apple trailers for quite some time

Linux has a lot of good stuff, but Red Hat leaves out some goodies that I like to use (some of these are available in the main third-party repositories):

I used to install yafc (best CLI FTP client out there, with good colorization and, unlike lftp, the ability to interact with local files and pipe things to shell commands), but apparently the maintainer has just decided to stop maintaining it. Ack!

I like to install atool. This is basically an intelligent (text-based) frontend to all the archive-handling tools out there. You just type aunpack <archive-name> and it checks the type and decompresses the archive. If there are multiple files in the root of the archive, it creates a new directory and puts them all in it.

WINE. WINE may not be perfect, but when you want to use a Windows program, you'll be glad that you have it set up.

mplayer. It's the most capable video player out there for Linux, even if some of the more advanced capabilities might be a bit intimidating at first.

Two tools -- one a small C program that I wrote that runs the program and arguments passed it "as a daemon" -- detached from a terminal. This is useful for running something that you want to keep
running in the background without the ability to output crud to the screen. The second is a pair of scripts that provide a version of xargs' functionality, but escape spaces and the like, so that one can use xargs on files with spaces in their names.

Valgrind. Valgrind is a very good memory debugger. Red Hat does not include it in the base distribution because of patent issues (/me hates software patents and the damage they do to the software development area). Exclusion of valgrind is a significant factor in increasing software bugginess. God, I wish the US had EU-style patent law.

Weird, but I can do the same thing with Slackware and Mplayer for free.

-H

Some of it comes with the base debian install:

GCC,G++
<flamewar>vim/emacs</flamewar>
links-ssl/curl-ssl-wget
ssh
Perl

Then a whole lotta debs for Gnome/KDE...

Then the actual desktop GUI:
GDM
IceWM
Idesk
Endeavour 2


Then the base apps
Anjuta (C++ IDE)
Gedit Notepad
Mplayer + plugins
XMMS + plugins
ALSA framework
Frozen Bubble!
the GIMP
Open Office
Thunderbird+Firefox
GAIM
Gnome-meeting

And the latest 2.6.x kernel

I've created a CD which will give you all the above in one disk. Automatic installations. Just create a linux/swap partition, and it will install to the largest available 'nix partition, also adding any windows partitions to the lilo.conf

ALSA Sound support is ready (though you must edit /etc/modules with whatever soundcard module you have)

X GUI starts in SVGA mode (best to xf86config and choose your GUI)
USB mouse support through /dev/input/mice

I'm considering putting it up online, but at about 620MB for the ISO I'd need some decent hosting space for that. So far we're using it at work to convert windows desktops to dual-boot... it's XP themes so the windows lusers can figure it out rather easily.

It's also configured to build the base menu structure when a user logs in... and idesk will mount a CD+browse with endeavour on doubleclick, or unmount+eject on a right-click.

1. Firefox
2. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
3. mplayer
4. Flash and Java plugins for the browers

Windows:

1. Putty
2. Firefox
3. Mozilla
4. The Adblock extension for Mozilla/Firefox
5. Spybot S&D
6. Flash/Java/Acroread plugins for the browsers
7. WinSCP
8. Cygwin (including XFree86 and Windowmaker)
9. OpenOffice

The only Windows I use is Windows XP Professional as a unix admin in a corporation, so some items may be notably absent. My entire Windows list is software that can be used royalty-free for commercial use )with an obvious emphasis on Free Software).

For example, I use XFree86 shipped with Cygwin for my X server, WinSCP for secure file transfer, Spybot S&D (and not AdAware, which is another excellent product, but would require a licensing fee be paid).

I don't use Winzip at all, since that functionality is built into the explorer interface in Windows XP Professional (don't know about the others), and is also available through Cygwin.

On the occasion I'm visiting a friend who runs Windows on a personal desktop, I also recommend Zinf, the audio player, since it's free software and just plays the music without any corporate spyware tie-ins, eg., contacting a server based on mp3 header fields as WMP and Winamp have started doing.

1. Fink - get the GNU POSIX environment on!
2. OSXVNC - get somewhere else
3. OO.o
4. Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
   • Flash
   • Acrobat Reader
   • StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
5. MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
6. WS Manager - Multiple desktop manager. I'm too cheap to pay to upgrade from OS 10.2 to 10.3 for Exposé, even with my wife's educational discount.

1. Cygwin - get the POSIX environment on!
2. PuTTY - the only terminal I've found that handles colors and stuff right.
3. TightVNC - get to some other computer
4. OO.o
5. vim - I'm not even a VI guy, but it's fast and has nice hooks into explorer and I'm too lazy to deal with registering TextPad or whatever. JEdit's also nice, but way too slow for casual use... I usually go straight to emacs for that kind of editing.
6. Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
   • Flash
   • Acrobat Reader
   • StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
7. Winamp - get the groove on
8. MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
9. MultiDesk - usable multiple desktops for Windows... like getting that 10% productivity improvement for having dual monitors without having to pay 100% more in displays. If only it had a visual pager...
10. Windows PowerToys - because every little option matters

More on Linux and MacOS X later, I guess...

Take, for example, the open source "MPlayer" (it states to be the media player for Linux, but AFAIK it compiles and runs on Windows as well) - it can play all three formats along with numerous others, and is in my experience much better optimized than any of those three individual players you mentioned. It doesn't have the clutter of WMP's interface as well, nor commercials or "upgrade noticies" etc...

Of course, noone uses MPlayer (on Windows, that is) since Windows Media Player comes with Windows. Why would they take the time to switch, after all, especially when they're not even made aware of MPlayer's existance?

You can use ASFRecorder, or, what I've been doing lately, use MPlayer with the -dumpstream option to save absolutely anything. I've recorded Windows Media video (with audio), RealMedia streams, MP3, and more. Works like a charm.

Prepare EDL files for MPlayer and use that for playing the DVDs. As a bonus, you can edit out the FBI warnings. Not sure how legal it is to do, though, but I don't suppose that's of any practical concern for normal people.

Well... and this differs from applying third-party cutting instructions exactly HOW?

MPlayer has a feature, EDL - a list of timecode offsets you want to skip during playback. If I make an EDL for a DVD, should I be banned from distributing it? If somebody other does the same, should I be banned from downloading and using it? If so, WHY? If it is my conscious decision to apply the EDL during playback, why I shouldn't be permitted to do so?

For those who use Linux, try Mplayer, and The kmplayer plug in for konqueror!

take a look at the mplayer site, they have an upgrade advisory for a security hole too...

He wasn't implying that, he simply said that red hat contributes. They don't just take the 200 buck licenses lauging to the bank, they pay people to make stuff available for everyone.

He may not have been trying to imply that, but it sounded like he might have been.

Remember gcc 2.96?

Uh what? That's a nice red herring. Again, red hat contributes back, the misbranded gcc is irrelevant here.

Ok, so the gnu link wasn't that informative. However, gcc 2.96 (before it was fixed) was -very- broken, and not an actual official gcc release, but instead the development version gcc + some patches redhat commited. Mplayer in particular had a lot of problems with it. Fortunately (as far as I know), Redhat didn't do anything else quite that bad, or I'd -really- rather not have Redhat's contributions.

Yes, multimedia is certainly something we'd like the desktop to do well. However, it's not realistic to expect comprehensive multimedia support from a Linux desktop today with open source software. It's a very difficult and costly problem to solve comprehensively. There are some positive signs, such as helix community, but you don't really have a single piece of software that does it all as well as the Windows variants.

Ummm...I'm not sure how to respond to this. How about mplayer? That has to be the best movie player I have ever used. And didn't it receive some sort of award recently? Or how about Xine?

Let's see...what else? The GStreamer framework is coming along nicely and will probably mature before the end of the year. There are several audio players available, some more usable than others, though. There are also more specialized programs like the Bedevilled Audio System. So I would hardly say linux is deficient in multimedia software.

A better alternative to the official divx codec (better = no spyware + higher quality + plays xvid + full codec free for non-comercial use) is 3ivx (for mac or windows).

(Of course all linux users already know mplayer is great for them (also great for OS X by the way))

Then get MPlayer

Sun's Java desktop comes with Realplayer installed. So its not a problem for customers of Java Destkop, who are most likley to use it. For everyone else there is Mplayer, the universial media player!