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Oh please, *none* of those three! Why doesn't anyone apart from P2P'ers use XviD/DivX with MP3 sound? Is it just the stigma? No, instead we have to put up with crappy Real/WM/QT video and sound. In fact, why don't they go with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC? It's the future of broadcast television and offers amazing compression. I've just started playing around with x264, and it blows away even XviD! And it will only get better with time. I'm sure the commercial developers have already got a better H.264 implementation. The only problem is that everyone has to install VLC for now. Oh well, just another media player to download, right? And you never know, people might actually like a simple player instead of the all-in-one media *centres* that the other media players have become.
</rant>

Some thing like this http://www.aminocom.com/products/ipstb/aminet120.h tml plus streaming with http://www.videolan.org/ might be what your looking for...

Which of the following would be the textual description of the second pic (http://www.videolan.org/pwntcha/goatse-captcha.jp g) for the Cwazymail implementation?
ASSRIPPING
OUCH!
DEARGOD!
I_CAN_SEE_HIS_TEETH

Yep. As the site said, this one is particularly effective.

When you saw this, did you:
- Burst out laughing?
- Sigh regretfully?
- Cover your mouth and run for the toilet?

Oh the irony.

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Productivity:

Graphics:

Media:

Internet:

Survival Kit:

Development:

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.

for home use, this is now, opensourec and what you want.
http://www.videolan.org/streaming/features.html
the BM will be neat when others start kicking in, but as a early adopter, not much gained from that (unless you happen to have too multiple slow servers for VLC.)

.wmvs played with VLC are safe

Ah, there's the beauty of it: VLC (like another poster mentioned of MPlayer) does not have any download servers anywhere in North America. Look at their mirror list. The DMCA has no effect on them unless a similiar law is adopted by the EU. And Brazil. And Taiwan.

You should check out videolan. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. It even plays DVDs.

As for quicktime or WMV or whatever, they sometimes offer lower bitrates than mpeg for a given quality, and lots of proprietary codecs came out between mpeg2 and mpeg4, offering mpeg4 type features long before the standard was final.

  VLChttp://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Also try VLC.

Well now you can switch to Mighty Mouse and VLC.

/ok, so VLC doesn't help with embedded content
//and you're stuck with Office

The rest of your issues seem distro related. You should try Ubuntu (with Totem-xine, see the Ubuntu guide) or any other friendly distro. Just because something costs money, it doesn't mean its any better.

Videolan has worked very, very, well for me. The -only- thing I can find that it won't play is DRM audio/video. I highly recommend it, even has a great GUI and lets u reencode files.

VLC rocks. It ignores all those annoying 'no skip' signals and gives you back control. Plus it's free and open-source.

Try vlc - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
or mplayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.htm l

Not that I have downloaded the clip yet myself, but those players have been able to play that kind of content in the past, mplayer in particular tends to be very high-performance/high-efficiency.

May I interest you in VideoLan?

I believe it will play WMVs on all systems it supports.

I believe GP was refering to vLc...

You can perform a simple test using VLC (http://www.videolan.org/ ... it already has support for both Theora and Dirac transcoding. I don't have a fast enough processor to actively test. harryk

They'll probably hike on an MPEG-4 AVC codec like H.264 to get the bitrate tolerably below 1mbps, and implement a hardware chip with adequate post-processing filters to improve image quality.

Playing back a 704x469 pixel x264-encoded video at 1mbps with stereo 48khz MP3, and using a few ffdshow filters looks damn fine to me on a Sony WEGA CRT - at around a GB for a 2+ hour movie. Though stereo MP3, obviously, is out of the question...(though it'd be a good idea to give an option between stereo and surround, so the stereo folks can save some on bandwidth.)

They might be able to squeeze it down some in resolution to account for people's general insensitivity to digital video and audio quality. Hell, a ton of my friends sadly can't tell the difference between analog TV and DVDs sometimes. So I think Netflix can afford some frugality with file size. Definitely 700 MB is tolerable in the mainstream if they go with MP4-AVC, lower the res and audio bitrate. But like you said, most people who would go for this would probably have 5mbps-download cable service that could easily take a couple mbps stream.

With Netflix's huge selection, an on-demand streaming service is an extremely tempting deal. Just wonder how much the set-top-box would cost...

Perhaps this will mean the banner that has existed on VideoLAN's site for the last several months can finally go away... (previous slashdot coverage)

well ive used AVG (free version), spybot (also free), and zonealarm for a firewall (thats free to), as well as firefox (last time i checked its free) to ensure a clean windows boxen...and the only problem ive had was a tracking cookie i got from a toyota website that was IE only when i decided to "build a car" (which i had to use IE to get btw)...

that should plaster over any problems in xp...

as far as software i bought... um... games...

and there is no need to buy any sort of dvd player app when there is VLC...

url: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

basicaly there is a free version of just about any app out there that you could use sans current games. and maybe video editing now that i think about it... but i dont do any video editing on my windows box...

Indeed, I was going to say that. In fact, the first appearance of the cracking of Apple's FairPlay encryption was in VLC, and was coded by none other than a certain JLJ:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/log/trunk/modules/de mux/mp4/drms.c

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/26/dvd_jon_on_vl c_and_a.html

Some parts of the patch (the interesting one and mime types) have already been commited to VLC trunk. Nightly builds (http://vthr.videolan.org/~videolan) compiled tonight will surely ba able to play google video content.

DVD Jon is also a programmer for the VideoLAN project as mentionned in this page with the other devellopers http://www.videolan.org/team/ I am not surprised he did made the change since he has been coding on this project for a long time.

TFA says nothing about patents problems that VLC and other media players are facing (see http://www.videolan.org/patents.html). But with Google in the bandwagon, I guess this problem can be solved with a win on the open source front :-)

It is safe to open WMV in VLC media player.

VLC is probably the best movie viewer for windows

But Media Player is staying on my system even if I have the option to uninstall it. Real is flaming awful.

There are other media players. Take
VLC for instance. It's truly free, available for most operating systems, and performs well.

DivX 5 was an MPEG-4 codec. As are XviD, 3ivx, ffmpeg's MPEG-4, QuickTime's MPEG-4, and lots of other codecs. They are all interoperable (if you don't enable extravagant mpeg features).

Divx 6 turns out to be just another proprietary video codec that nobody needs. I'm sure it will do better than h.264 since it doesn't comply to any spec. And they where able to look at lots of perfectly working "sample code".

VLC is probably the best movie viewer for windows that I've ever seen, just because of the fact that it plays practically everything you can imagine without having to download random codecs here and there (most of the time anyway). Can DivX 6.0 do the same?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Your working media player...for free!

Use vlc. That can skip to any part of a DVD. It even has a fast open thing where it goes straight to the film. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

http://www.videolan.org/

Is it noise cancelling? It seems that it just adds sampled sound to mask conversations.

"sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range"

Horrible article. No details on how the product works or what it does.

And for the map thingy... It's been done some time ago (2002).
Here's a movie (25 MB) from Sony research (Jun Rekimoto, SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulation on Interactive Surfaces):

http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/movies/c hi02-2-mp2.mpg

Use VLC to view the movie.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Movie taken from
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/smartski n/

Either VLC or the latest version of Real Player should play it.

However the streams are a bit sketchy right now, probably due to the Slashdot effect.

I mostly use cross-platform apps. VLC is a good media player (Get it while you can!). And if you want a familiar text editor you can try gVIm for windows.

A descent text editor: have you tried Notepad 2 for me it has worked wonders, as I was looking for a text editor as fast as notepad with more features but not as bloated as JEdit or UltraEdit (this last is not free).

Descent media player, have you tried VCL? personally I think MS Media player is quite good, as I can play almost everything on it, but of course as it is from Microsoft it surely is crap for you so, VLC will do it.

Decent Clipboard viewer, this (clipbrd) page might be useful for you and guess what, you have to TYPE the command to use it, so you wont miss the Linux way.

And what do you mean by "unsupported"?? unsupported by who? by the operating system? those apps are not more supported by Linux than by Linux, in both OS they have the exactly same licenses. In none of them can you call the OS company representatives to help you using them (as both of them will tell you to RTF-Forums-FAQs, etc).

And the Gimp is equally FULLY SUPPORTED in Windowze, I can see you are just flamebaiting... ask the people who made the Gimp how much "more" they support The Gimp for windows and for Linux... WTF are you barfing about?... I do not know why am I answering to your comment...

"This is just getting rediculous. When will people stop referring to QuickTime as a codec."

There's a few options.

You could try VLC, it's a brilliant movie player for mac and seems to support flac, haven't tried flac files myself though (I know it plays ogg).

Alternatively, you could install fink and then xmms, a popular media player on Linux that I know plays flac (with the right plugin). Of course, for this you'll need to startx each time to get a working X11 server and then launch xmms from there... you won't get drag 'n drop with the finder etc. but it might work... I'm not a mac guru, I'm a Linux user who recently bought an iBook...

Those of you who use and love VLC Media Player may want to take a look at this:

http://www.videolan.org/patents.html

Real IS based in Seattle, near the waterfront.

Under the law, Real would have to prove that it's software is NOT Spyware, or otherwise it will face fines.

On a funny side note, the last time I saw the Real building, there where three traffic cones in front of the door, with the letters VLC written with black permenent ink.

There is only one player, and one player to rule them all. Don't forget, it's still free. It doesn't just play music either.

Video Lan

The stream is being broadcast through an open source streaming server called Darwin streaming server, and can be viewed using Video Lan Client. Check out http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. It's a platform that has proven to be stable.

For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.

QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.

Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now.

ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)

Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?

A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.

The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.

Why H.264 is such big news?

The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.

As I discovered with the Serenity Trailer, you can run most (if not all) MOV files under VLC and not have to install any more garbage just because you want to do one thing. Plus, VLC is just a fine piece of media player when my old Windows Media Player 4.0 won't do.

If you can't get it to work, grab a copy of vlc http://www.videolan.org/ - I've had files that media player makes unwatchable run fine in it... Should (iirc) also come with a whole bunch of codecs included as well...