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If you have a good media player such as VLC (which will become illegal unless software patents are defeated in Europe! Europeans call your reps NOW!) and the video and srt file are named the same thing (excluding the difference in extension), the player will give you the option of showing subtitles. SUB/IDX files also are an option if you want multiple subtitle files.

Or, as an alternative, you could use OGM or MKV (matroska) as a container for subs and video. Fansubbers do this often with anime and other movies.

You can us vlc, http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Here is VLC for OS X.

To display in full screen, either Apple-F or Menu Bar | Video | Full Screen.

So download something that can.

I must point you in the direction of VLC. It has more codecs than I've ever needed bundled with it, has more options and settings than Quicktime and even integrates nicely with the look and feel of OSX (something that can't be said for quite a few OSS tools, however much I like them)

If you have a better product, then people will use yours over the default. This is why more people use Winamp and iTunes than use Media Player.

Who are those people you talk about? Me? The Slashdot crowd? My 16 yr old brother? Yes, we will use alternative software if it's better than the default.

My mother, my grandparents and my neighbours on the other hand, will not. They just use whatever they get. How are they supposed to know about some great opensource mediaplayer which works way better than WMP? You don't exactly see TV adds for it...

Joe sixpack plays his mp3s using WMP for the same reason he runs windows: It came with his Dell PC. It works. No need to spend time looking for alternatives.

You should not be using Debian testing unless you perfectly know what you are doing. It is almost impossible to support Debian testing and there are no plans to do it.

You should not be using Debian testing unless you perfectly know what you are doing. It is almost impossible to support Debian testing and there are no plans to do it.

if you haven't tried it already, you may want to look into VLC. IMO, it's a much more capable player than Mplayer, with builtin support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc., and can play DVDs, VCDs, as well as a number of streaming formats.

i think the biggest plus for me is that it's capable of switching the audio track playing, and can handle video files with included subtitles and most external subtitle formats, so it's great for watching multi-language rips.

and in my experience, the playlist feature is far more stable in VLC than Mplayer OS X.

you can find it at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

disclaimer: i have no involvement with VLC other than using it far, far too much. @.~

Try getting VLC Player
It will do fine on *all* Operating Systems.

Take a look at Nicecast. They claim "One-Click Broadcasting Of Any Audio On OS X"

A VideoLAN and VLC setup could also be the solution. It would be cheaper (as in free), but more work to setup.

I've been using this solution for playing DIVX files from my laptop (which is connected to my projector, while the audio is routed to AirPort Express) for some time, and works well, thanks to the author's knowledge, and the power of VLC !

using vlc you can stream video over a network. you can even reencode the media on the fly!

Use VLC as your software DVD player on any of your macs. As it reads the DVD like a data source and uses the DeCSS algorithm, you'll never have to worry about regions ever again.

BTW it is Free and Open-Source.

You CAN'T pick anything from the remote machine in a VLC streaming session - you get to look/listen to what's served.

As a matter of fact you can - it has an HTTP remote control interface, at port 8080 by default. See http://videolan.org/doc/play-howto/en/ch04.html#id 2533499

It works fine in the VLC Media Player. VLC is a great program - it plays just about any video and you never have to download codecs

No SSH server

System Preferences -> Sharing -> check the Remote Login box and your ssh server is running.

No autoscroll on the trackpad (fixed but only for new powerbooks)

Not standard, but if you have newish trackpad hardware you can use: http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/ (this was working last night but seems down at the moment)

Doesn't support focus on mouse

Would that even work for the Mac? With the application menu at the top of the screen, you'd be likely to lose the current focus as you move up the screen and pass over other windows.

No support for a folder of applications as a single widget on the dock.

That would be handy, though perhaps LaunchBar would cover it?

It's region locked.

As are all hardware players, as required by the DVD consortium - you can hardly blame Apple for that! There is a RPC2->1 hack for many of the Mac players, but not yet for the one in the latest G4 PowerBooks.

It only resizes to half/full/double/full screen instead of being arbitrarily sizable.

Try better placer, such as VLC.

Compared to MS Windows, OS X comes with a LOT of extra stuff already. Seems like you want it to be a little too much like the X window system. Still, I'd be surprised if there weren't 3rd party solutions for most things you're after...

Microsoft being allowed to drive the standard of media playing software is just scary, given their past history. I refuse to support WMP in any way possible. VLC is a wonderful alternative.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Does anyone know how to get around these restrictions?

Get an unlimited, uncrippled media sharing solution. Go with something like VideoLAN (free!) or my personal favourite, Media Center. MC can upsample or downsample or transcode on the fly, serves up library audio and video to unlimited number of clients across LAN or WAN (I tried to max it out with 8 LAN clients and 5 WAN clients onetime and it just kept on chugging), and works with pretty much every codec I throw at it.

A lot of people are talking about hooking up a Mac mini in their living rooms to be used as a home multi-media server. These people have the right idea but are too stuck using older paradigms.

They complain about small hard drives.
They complain about the hard drives being slow (4200 rpm)
They complain about the possibility of noise.
They complain about non-expandability.

Most of these people are not thinking using the obvious features of OS X. Want to load MP3s onto the mini sitting in the living room? Why? Just use a huge server somewhere else in the house. iTunes supports streaming. it is the easiest thing in the world to set up.

Want to show photos and slide shows on your big television? What do you know - iPhoto supports photo sharing. You can have 100 gigs worth of photos sitting on your huge desktop in your office, and with one checkbox you can view them all on the mini in the living room.

People that have not played around with Rendezvous and iTunes/iPhoto sharing under OS X have no idea how easy this is. Two checkboxes. No networking knowledge needed *at all*.

The only thing right now you cannot do out of the box is stream video. There is a solution to that, though, as well - VideoLAN.

The advantages of these solutions is also to keep noise down in the actual living room. No big server hard drive going means it is more quiet, and means that the Mac mini can remain small.

We recommend two solutions for players:

- QuickTime Player, for Mac OS and Windows
- VideoLan Client (VLC), for Mac OS and Windows, but also many other operating systems

I love and use VideoLan Client (VLC), but are you sure it's legal to use VLC to play MPEG-4 with AAC audio without paying additional licensing fees? I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure Real Player 10 for Linux/Unix will play MPEG-4 with AAC legally.

From the "Legal concerns" section of the VideoLAN FAQ:

3.3. Is libdvdcss legal?

The use and distribution of the libdvdcss library is controversial in a few countries such as the United States because of a law called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). If you are unsure about the legality of using and distributing this library in your country, please consult your lawyer.

Note
Beware: VLC media player binaries are distributed with the libdvdcss library included.

3.4. What about personal/commercial usage?

Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.

With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.

This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.

Also, I have found no problems with .mp4 files (with MPEG-4 video/ and both mp3 and mp4 (aka AAC) audio): they play in quicktime on mac os x and with vlc on any other platform.

Also, I have found no problems with .mp4 files (with MPEG-4 video/ and both mp3 and mp4 (aka AAC) audio): they play in quicktime on mac os x and with vlc on any other platform.

Thus, when H.264 encoders become availible

They've been available for some time...

NeroDigital
x264
VideoSoft
Moonlight
Sorenson
Reference encoder

And those are just off the top of my head.

"WMP support" is already available as there are several directshow splitters and decoders around. VideoLAN's support is almost complete, the only essential things it lacks are deblocking for b-frames and the new high profile stuff.

VLC (video lan client) is an impressive and full featured media player for (essentially) all platforms. Coupled with the mozilla/netscape/firefox plugin for VLC, movies can be viewed in the browser window. VLC is unique in that it has its own video decoding software (goodbye dll hell). QT video USUALLY works in VLC but not always with the newest forms of QT. I have turned a number of Windows only users on to VLC and Firefox and have never heard of any subsequent problems. The students and the school in Paris that are developing VLC have done a fine job! I have never had a VLC crash and find its ability to stream and transcode A/V over the network from a GUI impressive (it also generates the command line options you would specify if you went cmd line only).

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

Still.. many non-techies are averse to installing unfamiliar software on their computers.

We recently went through the same exercise. Our requirements were:

- Reasonably high quality at a relatively low datarate.
- Video and audio formats should be open standards.
- Primary target is Mac OS and Windows, but would be nice to play on other OSes, such as Linux and Solaris.

We found everything we were looking for in MPEG-4 (Part 2) video with AAC audio.

We recommend two solutions for players:

- QuickTime Player, for Mac OS and Windows
- VideoLan Client (VLC), for Mac OS and Windows, but also many other operating systems

This has the advantage of providing a free, supported, full featured player for the vast majority of visitors (i.e., Mac OS and Windows), but also offers a reliable free open source player for many other platforms, in addition to Mac OS and Windows.

Soon, we'll be switching to H.264 (AVC or MPEG-4 Part 10), for which free playback support will be available in QuickTime 7 for Mac OS and Windows. Playback support will no doubt be added to the likes of VLC.

While I'm not a *nix guru, I think that finding a decent codec for cross-platform video shouldn't be terribly difficult. Personally, I've found that MPlayer has fairly good fleaxability when it comes to input. It even says that it supports "ASF/WMV/WMA format". ;)

I think that if you find a codec that works well for you, you should use it. If all else fails, why not have 2 downloads? That would be easier on the pipes then having 1, larger, download.

P.S. - This might be helpful too.

Real Player 10 works on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can just dump WMV and use only Real Format. Also Real 10 now has browser plug-ins for Mozilla/Firefox and IE.

If you are _really_ against using Real, then IMO the next best would be just standard MPEG-1 videos or divx. With divx, you will have Windows, Linux and MacOS X support with no problems.

If you don't go with Real, them IMO go with divX or MPEG-4, and have a blurb on the video page that directs users to the download page for VLC. There are versions of VLC for Windows, Linux, Mac and others. VLC will play tons of content on all platforms out-of-the-box.

These can be played on virtually every platform including Mac, Windows, Linux, *BSD, BeOS and other with the free VideoLanClient (vlc).

This software is linked to copies of VLC http://videolan.org/ and XVID http://xvid.org/ both of which are released under the GPL license. The EULA for this software consititues a violation of this license. The LGPL license would allow for a proprietary program to use the library, but the GPL only allows other free programs to use it. A cease and desist order should be expected. And anyone who doesn't believe this, check the link: http://people.via.ecp.fr/~jb/VLCthieves2.jpg

What are you talking about? H.264 (aka AVC) is an open standard. Apple is not the only one who implents this standard. In fact, Apple is quite slow. Here's a short list of available encoders:
Sorenson Squeeze 4, MainConcept H.264 Encoder, Nero Digital AVC, Hdot264, x264, etc....

And when you look how bad the quality of Apple's MPEG-4 ASP is (compared to XviD, DivX,...), I wouldn't bet that Apple AVC will be so great either.
If you want to encode on Mac I guess that Sorenson Squeeze 4 is currently the best sollution. According to the latest codec comparison on Doom9.net NeroDigital AVC is the best codec (Sorenson was not tested).

I like and use Media Player Classic (MPC), but it's not a complete "replacement" for recent versions of Windows Media Player (WMP). Some features of WMP that MPC lacks:

• Rip/Encode CDs
• Shop for Music and Video (Windows Media Format) on the Internet
• Organize Your Digital Media Collection
• Take Your Music and Video with You (portable music/video players)
• Burn Your Own CDs

I think a better supplement for WMP is VLC media player. VLC plays (without installing additional codecs) DVDs, MPEG-2, MP4, DivX, XviD, Ogg, AC3, FLAC, H263, AAC, and others (VLC does not use DirectShow to play files). Before downloading a DirectShow codec, I always try playing a file in VLC media player first.

I like and use Media Player Classic (MPC), but it's not a complete "replacement" for recent versions of Windows Media Player (WMP). Some features of WMP that MPC lacks:

• Rip/Encode CDs
• Shop for Music and Video (Windows Media Format) on the Internet
• Organize Your Digital Media Collection
• Take Your Music and Video with You (portable music/video players)
• Burn Your Own CDs

I think a better supplement for WMP is VLC media player. VLC plays (without installing additional codecs) DVDs, MPEG-2, MP4, DivX, XviD, Ogg, AC3, FLAC, H263, AAC, and others (VLC does not use DirectShow to play files). Before downloading a DirectShow codec, I always try playing a file in VLC media player first.

That's the succinct feature list. Visit the full features list, and it claims to support ASF/wmv/wma, etc. Whether it fully supports them for all versions of the codecs, or if you need WMP installed to get the codecs, I'm not sure. I have not tried those formats with VLC myself. It would be interesting to try the bogus/worm ones on a test PC and see what VLC does with them. If it ignores the embedded URLs, then VLC is indeed a Firefox/Mozilla-like solution for Microsoft's buggy software.

Why? It's redundant. Such an application already exists. Use VLC. Even if it is not 100% as capable as WMP for everything (e.g., I don't know if it supports DRM like WMP :-)), it has most of the features I would ever want, and it is more capable in many ways. It is also vastly more portable than WMP.

Why? You already have VLC, it's open source, multi-platform and plays a gazillion file formats

If you want a decent open source media player, choose VLC. It works great on Win32, Linux & OS X. Works well supporting CDs, DVDs, AVI, DiVX, MP3, Ogg and just about every other media format known to man - except protected WMA.

So if the exploit relies on dangling a "carrot" in the shape of some free pr0n if you download some licence into WMP, VLC won't protect you from yourself and doesn't offer comparable functionality.

Use the excellent - and free - VLC media player

Music - XMMS (WinAMP on Windows), is there even a comparison to Windows Media Player here?

WinAMP ist not FOSS. It's a free (beer) closed source app.
Both are just a joke comparing to iTunes.

Video - MPlayer, it even runs without X Window. Can Windows Media Player run video in MS-DOS?

What kind of argument is this? Who cares about DOS? WMP is OK when you install the missing codecs. (I prefer VLC though)

Web Browser - Mozilla FireFox. Internet Exploder doesn't even compare.

And Opera? Firefox is also my favourite browser, but Opera has many interesting features that you can't find anywhere else. Opera is commercial or free (beer) software, but not FOSS.

File Browsing - Nautilus, Konqueror. They crash 100% less of the time that Windows Explorer crashes.

What are you doing with Explorer? I didn't see it crash the last couple of... er... years.

And no annoyingly built-in Internet Explorer that's available even if I denied access to iexplore.exe (which I do on spyware-infested clients' computers).

How about blocking Explorer.exe and deleting iexplore.exe? (That's what I do when I have do mess with Windows.)

And let's not mention the horrid Mac OS X versions of MS Office.

Yeah, MS Office:mac is sooo bad when compared against GNUmeric and OpenOffice. OK, GNUmeric and OpenOffice only run in an X-Window, don't support drag&drop, looks ugly-as-hell, etc. while MS Office supports all that stuff. Wow, GNUmeric and OpenOffice are soooo superior.....
(BTW: Yes, I know about NeoOffice/J - it's my main Office suite. But NeoOffice is != OpenOffice)
Abiword compares to Wordpad, not Word (or OpenOffice Writer).

Instant Messenger - Well, GAIM may be missing some features of proprietary AOL AIM, but one of those features missing is the spyware.

Trillian? How about that?

Programming - Do I even need to compare the long list of free, open-source and standardized Unix/Linux tools to the not-quite-as-affordable MS Visual Studio??

A lot of developers say that VisualStudio is the best programming environment. Others say it's Xcode. Both aren't FOSS.

PS: No, I'n not bashing FOSS. Most apps I use are FOSS like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Fire Messenger, but theres more closed source software that's better than it's FOSS counterparts than just Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Opera is cool. Trillian is cool. MS Office:mac, Explorer (not IE), or Windows Media Player not so bad either.

Use PeerCast to stream an Ogg Media format stream. Hook up VLC to it and you're all set.

Yes, this all works on Mac OS X.

P2P Streaming will revolutionize high quality broadcasting on the internet.

> They are loaded and indexed in an unusual fashion
True
> When iTunes copies the file onto the iPod, it does all this magic transparently, but it doesn't change the format.
Could you explain then why the file copied (I believe converted) to the iPod couldn't be played by WinAMP or VLC?

I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated

According to doom9, you'd be looking at using XviD or NeroDigital (depending on your preferences). You could probably cut the average movie down to a gig of absurdly-good-(for-ripped-movies)-quality or so, if you so desired. You could even (if you so chose) keep the subtitles, separate audio tracks, etc. by using a container format like Matroska or Ogg if you so chose. I mean really, another 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio track won't take up THAT much space. For the content I store, anyway, I'd at least keep subtites and the Japanese and English language tracks.

If you wanted to get crazy with it, you could set up VideoLAN and then just make streaming requests over the network for whatever you want (VideoLAN primer article). After you had that set up, you could throw a (few) TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG encode and stream TV channels around the house as well. Throw in another TV card to act as your TiVo to record/encode/archive programmes and add them to the collection to be indexed, allowing them to be streamed on demand.

With 2.5 terabytes of space, you could do a LOT of archiving. Once you figure out how to get the system set up to do everything I discribed above, you'd be set until well after we start seeing 1GB drives for $200 or less, at which point you can upgrade to 5GB and onward.

That'd be pretty cool, actually.

The problem was that Real cracked Apple's Fairplay code and violated the license.

Locked out Real after Real cracked Apple's Fairplay code violating the license.

I agree with using VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/, it can also capture from a windows or v4l video device to disk while transcoding it and streaming it over a network (unicast or multicast)... if you have enough cpu. You can use the VLC gui to figure out the command line options you need to run the streams in a shell window.

A co-located server with lots of bandwidth and low latency would recieve 2 mono audio and 1 video feed from each location and sum it with some baddass realtime video editing software. The editing crew would switch between various incoming video views (the pubs and the main announcer) which are arranged and streamed back to the pubs as their A/V. Now you just have to find some fancy computer live-tv editing software

For buzzers, I suggest a simple open/close relay circuit wired to a printer port and a nice loud electronic bell ringer. maybe some kits online for cheap? while you are buying the parts for your relay circuits, get some nice buttons and mate them to solid-feeling metal pipes and buy high grade cabling. Add in a DC power supply and put blue blinking LEDs on the buzzer that rings in first in the pub (so the camera man can focus in). Imagine... 4 players at each location creating a playing field of 12 people. Later, since you have all of the technology set up, you can do qualifier rounds every monday and championship rounds on friday night

Just because it uses AES doesn't mean it's secure.

x264 is a free (GPL) implementation done by one of the French guys of the videolan team (who made the VLC player).
http://www.videolan.org/x264.html
MPlayer-pre6 now supports it. You just need to compile the x264 codec, and compile MPlayer with the x264 libraries linked (see ./configure options).

I tried it, it is very promising.
Apparently it also works with transcode and has a Win32 version too.

See alsothis thread about using mencoder and x264:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=830 39

Why'd they choose xvid? Maybe because MPEGs would be twice as big (or far lower picture quality).

Since apparently spending 30 seconds searching is too much to ask of you, here's how to play xvids:
On Windows: go here, download and install ffdshow. Xvid files should now play in whatever video player you use.
Alternatively, this page has a list of other Xvid binaries you can try, and I believe Divx also will read xvid files if you have it installed.
On Mac OS: download and run VLC media player

There's no mention in this of klik which allows you to simply download and run other software with knoppix (and other systems). Klik even gave everyone a christmas present of a 100M download of openoffice2 (well 1.9.65 or something similar) which allows you to try it simply and without installing, no need to upgrade your system and risk impacting anything else.

A second quick point is that it doesn't seem to provide useful information on encrypted DVDs. It is quite easy to download and extract libdvdcss2 and run xine so it can find the extracted libraries (LD_LIBRARY_PATH) so with a 27k download you can watch any DVDs you like with the existing xine.

I've had a much better experience (on all platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux) with VLC Player. I find it better in every way than Media Player Classic.