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People are outraged that they can't use the default clunky Windows Media player? Hahaha.

Here are two much better replacements:
VLC Media Player
Media Player Classic

Yes, learn QT and help out with KDE. I haven't done much programming with QT, I am confident when I say it's a lovely, powerful and compelling environment to program in. Its cross platform capabilities cannot be under estimated. VLC was created using QT.

So go ahead, learn QT, help out with KDE and make subsequent releases even more formidable.

Thanks.

Just use VLC. It plays pretty much everything.

The only reason I have iTunes installed is because I couldn't find a Quicktime download that didn't come with it. The only reason I have Quicktime installed is because of people who only make their content available as Quicktime files for whatever reason.

VLC player can play most quicktime content: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

VLC should be able to handle pretty much any media, including Quicktime files.

And what technology is available for Ogg Theora (not Vorbis) that can encode and stream a live event to hundreds of millions of people?

VideoLAN Client (VLC for short), for example, is free, open source, does Ogg Vorbis (for audio) and Theora (for video), and it can be used both as the streaming server AND as the client, on Linux, Windows and Apple computers.

They've excluded me from the most open inauguration in history as well. As a lynx user, they haven't trascoded into a codec I can use, like streaming ASCII art.

Sarah Palin would have fixed that. I bet all her moose hunting videos are available as streaming ASCII art. Plus she can see ASCII-Russia (or RSCII-Russia, really) from her house. Ron Paul would have been better too, he'd have just given us all free Gold Bullion.

Because, it appears, that the problem is that they only have enough bandwidth two support one or two copies of the stream. If you have computers in 15 different classrooms, and the teachers load up hulu.com (or cnn.com, msnbc.com, cspan.org, whatever) and play the video, this will result in 15 different copies of the stream being separately downloaded.

What they need is some sort of multicast-like solution - something where the stream is being downloaded only once. Since the Internet hasn't really adopted multicast (which is really the 'solution' for these types of problems), the next best thing is, as some people have suggested, some sort of 'proxy server', which goes and loads the video, over the T1, then all the classrooms stream the video from that proxy server over the LAN.

I wonder if VLC could be used to do such proxying (probably depends on the stream format - if it's a 'standard' format without DRM, VLC might be able to handle this)?

I find the manner in which you attack the person instead of the idea to be very telling. It is a very moronic and nonsensical behavioral pattern, like using brass knuckles to finish off a chess match.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any schools (aside from church, or perhaps prison) which can rectify such basic and imbecilic logical fallacies as these.

I don't have any particular advice for you on this matter. These are just my observations.

But I digress. VLC might be part of the answer, but Google brought me to this post which states that VLC and C-Span do not cohabitate well.

With this in mind, perhaps the question would be better stated as follows:

"We have chosen to use a labor-intensive network video distribution system in a production environment, with little time for testing and even less time to develop failsafes, and huge opportunities for human error at all points. We selected this route because television is too easy, the picture is too good, the sound is always in sync. We feel that by using Teh Intarwebs, we'll be inspiring our schoolchildren to always look for the most difficult, elaborate, and expensive attack angle whenever there is a problem to solve, as per the gospel of Rube Goldberg.

Besides, TV is just uncool, with its lack of buffering and all. Where might we find a VLC-compatible feed of the inauguration proceedings?"

Also, don't forget VLC! It can capture, encode, stream, and play all in one package (and do so on virtually every platform under the sun).

I second VLC. It isn't pretty; but it runs anywhere, plays anything, and is quite powerful.

http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/streaming-howto-en.html

Could be wrong, but can't VLC (VideoLanClient) do the trick?
Get it to recieve one copy of the stream, and then repeat it over the local network (assuming your local network has the bandwidth).

For anybody who's interested: The old 0.8.6i release of VLC is good. Hopefully 1.0.0 will be of this quality or better.

I have a feeling MKV is exactly what's needed right now.

And I have a feeling that you're wrong.

Splendid argument! You clearly are victorious on this one.

MPEG (all revisions) and VP1 are also open standards.

For a fee MPEG is very open for you to implement. Have a look here and here. Mind you H.264 is equally open, so the argument about free and open is moot anyway. We can debate the legality of patents and the GPL as much as we want, but the truth is that in some countries you're very likely to get sued if you ship a commercial product without paying the fee.

MKV is here to stay simply because it's perfect for 2009.

I don't know if Matroska is here to stay, but I'm sure seeing a lot of it lately. I personally prefer Matroska because it's worked well enough for me. If it's here to stay is something we'll see if in 5 years. I'm pretty sure that its use will predominantly be by pirates/thieves/ninjas/media-liberators/whatever-term-you-fancy, and that a small minority will actually use it for something legal. The major media outlets will most likely ignore it completely, because they've already invested tons of money in MPEG and both standards still do the same damn thing. The average consumer won't care as long as the moving pictures keep coming to his giant widescreen tv.

The thing I'm most hyped about anyway is H.264, or rather my experiences with x264. I've been using it to do some tests for encoding data from an HD camera and I'm quite pleased with the results.

It might default to software, but there is a check box for hardware overlay in the version I am using (8.6 on XP). The feature matrix suggests that there is good output support across all platforms:

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

Perhaps you are thinking about decoding, which is different than output (I don't think VLC can take advantage of hardware decoding, but it is not all that important for viewing movies on computers made in the last 5 years)?

K. Start using Mplayer [1] and VLC [2] NOW. They ignore the executable parts of MSFT's multimedia formats.

[1] Grab the "Windows GUI" and the "Windows X86 codec package" from here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
[2] http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I partly agree with your post. But still when I look at vlc's version (present version - 0.9) number it gives me an impression that the player is somehow imperfect though I found it to be a very mature media player.Of course vlc is an open source product that is not susceptible to the tugs and pressures that plague commercial software.
Personally I feel impressions do matter and that giving a "bump" to the version number of a product is a valid and not a dishonest marketing tactic.

Apparently you have never heard of VLC

You can get it to work: just use VLC media player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
and open the video stream:
File->Open Network Stream
check HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MSS and put in the url http://www.cnn.com/video/live/cnnlive_1.asx

then watch and try not to vomit!

I believe it is trying to destroy all of internet Radio. As has been pointed out, as late as 2005, Sony BMG was fined millions for payola to radio stations, "encouraging" them to play what THEY wanted played. http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2005/08/01/sony-bmg-fined-for-payola-to-the-tune-of-10-million/

Pandora offers the individual listener the potential of having music served to them that their algorithm determines should be a good match. Pandora listeners have the option of tweaking that selection with an "I like" or an "I don't like" vote. However, a Pandora listener can just as easily populate their playlist with only specific songs that THEY want to listen to.

Traditional radio/satellite radio offers all listeners the same songs. The only choices are to change the station and hope for the best, or turn the radio off. You have to accept what you are handed. Radio stations create rotations... Pop, Heavy, Medium, Light...etc. Songs in the POPular rotation get played the most often, over and over, until they get relegated to the Heavy rotation. Songs in the heavy rotation get played more often than those in medium rotation, and those in medium... well you get the picture. What I think should be in Heavy rotation does not necessarily match what you think should be in heavy rotation. But here's a little insight for you, from my 4 years as an FM DJ. The songs in the different rotations, get their rotation designation from the music director of the station, based on what HE thinks the rotation should be. He bases his decision on things like Bilboard top 100, requests, and even his or her personal preference. Which brings us back to Traditional radio/Satellite radio is a controlled medium, where someone is deciding what is popular and what is not, and passing that info down to you.

What is the connection to the music Industry trying to destroy all of internet radio? Are you familiar with the popular media player called VLC? http://www.videolan.org/ and give it a try. Did you know that it keeps a list of internet radio stations that you can pick and choose from? If you downloaded it (or already have it), start it up. From the top menu, hit view, and open the playlist. From the Playlist, hit Manage, and look at Services Directory. We are only interested in Shoutcast Radio Listings. There are currently 397 internet radio stations in that list. The number will vary as some are very amateur, and some are essential commercial. All are considered internet radio. The Music industry cannot exert a controlling influence over all of them to make them play what they would wish. When all you need is add a plugin to your Winamp player to turn your music collection into a Shoutcast Radio station, how can the music industry exert control over you? What they can do, is track you down by your IP address (just like a movie thief), contact you through your ISP, and have you fined for not paying for the music you play... until you make the choice THEY want, which is you see that it costs you more than you get out of having your own radio station.

The music industry not only wants their dollar. They want the old days back where they decided what was hot and what was not, and they want to get back to those days of serving up their choices in music to the public.

It's slow, crashy and overcomplicated.

Your first two arguments are unprovable flamebait, and the last is a matter of opinion. There are lots of people who think it's fast, stable, and just complicated enough.

It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software.

Again, the first is a matter of opinion, and I would think you could at least realize that you're in the minority. Lots of people think the desktop is pretty and well-organized. The last is, again, flamebait. It may not come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, but Safari, Pages, Mail, iTunes, Xcode, DVD Player, and the various iLife apps, among others, are far from unusuable or indecent. And, despite the fact that it doesn't come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, there are many thousands of free and open source programs that you can install.

It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox.

"Doesn't render stuff" is, again, unproveable flamebait. Safari does just fine in rendering tests. You're also showing off your ignorance, as it does have AdBlock. Come on, that's the first link in Google.

It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware.

This is just wrong and uninformed. Those are just examples off the top of my head that I like, there are plenty of other free and open source players out there.

It doesn't even have a usable text editor!

What about TextEdit and Pages is not usable?

If those are too flashy for you, just install vim or emacs. They work fine.

It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.

You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.

As for the encoding, show me a free open source H.264 encoder

How about this one? It's included with vlc and mplayer by default, so you can use their transcoding capabilities to generate it from any other format that they support.

Waiting to hear news that the movie's been unlocked in 3... 2... 1...

Good news for you...

Used copy of Ghost Busters: $5 - $10 or so
2GB Flash Drive: $15 - $20
DVD Shrink to strip out everything but the movie, compress enough to fit in 2GB, and save as an ISO image: Free
VLC Media Player to play said ISO on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS-X, BeOS, Windows, QNX (WTF is this?), or Syllable (WTF is this one as well?): Free

Purchasing an overpriced, DRMed version of a movie (that will most likely be playable only on a Windows box) just because it's sold on a Flash Drive?: Pointless

Sorry, VLC, not VNC.

We already have it, it's called VideoLAN. It's located at videolan.org. It's not the prettiest in the world, but then if you're looking at the interface instead of your movie I suggest you get some better movies.

Plays absolutely everything out of the box. If I don't feel like messing around with codecs and just want to watch video, "sudo apt-get install vlc." Done.

For audio I'm a KDE guy so I'm a fan of amaroK. Quite simply I haven't found a better music player. I'm sure some tastes will differ, but I find I'm far from alone on this one.

But yeah, I think Linux in general has the whole "multimedia" thing figured out. I'd like some better audio support but then again I've only had a problem once in over a decade of use with a wide variety of systems. To the curious, it was a Turtle Beach card. However, I understand other people have audio show-stoppers though.

I know that the Video Lan Client has a wizard to simplify the conversion of video into the Ogg Theora format. You might want to give that a try. It seems to automate most option choices by default to simplify the process.

I wasn't aware of the player that is recommended on the nasa.gov site: VLC:

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

I tried it out and it works well for me so I got rid of Quicktime.

Yeah, try out VLC (VideoLAN). If that doesn't work, use Linux. I have no problems playing anything using the DVD libraries (like libdvdread and so forth) and Mplayer-based players (Kaffeine).

That's why I use VLC. If VLC can't play it, I probably don't want to watch it; either that, or they'll come out with an update so I can. After all, VLC comes built-in with every legit codec installed, and, even though it doesn't use the codecs installed in WindWoes, it actually runs faster and w/ a smaller memory footprint than WMP.

Video LAN Client. Seriously, there's no reason to load up an Apple product no matter what platform you're on (apart from Apple, of course.)

Toshiba/IBM guys should get some commit access to ffmpeg/x264/VLC and start working on enhancing the tools for Cell CPU. ffmpeg or x264 aren't "nerd things" anymore, they are used by every kind of user embedded in easily used products.

Firefox became huge and everyone optimises for it or fix its code right? If I remember correct, the Download record was 10 million+... Look at VLC without any kind of record campaign, you will be amazed: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

It is 92 million right now and counting.

Dual discs... so that's what those are. I wouldn't expect most programs to recgonize the DVD half of it, but downloading VLC and clicking file->wizard should take you through most of the steps of ripping the audio out of the DVD part of it.

Is is (or should be) legal to download something you already own in some form, neglecting the fact that you generally have to share/upload/seed to others who probably don't own it. It's just unfathomable to me that anyone would try to download something when they have the disc right there... ^.^ I would rather spend the $150 for a drive and eSATA enclosure and never worry about backups again than try to fight with torrents or rapidshare or, heaven forbid, kazaa or some other gnutella POS.

Personal preference, I guess. I have the disc, and the disk space, so I want my copy lossless. Let WMP re-encode it for me when I plug my MP3 player in. But, I can see where others would prefer to get online copies - just be careful with the torrents, especially at college. Mine will potentially kick you out for torrenting music (it's in the honor code, but it's mostly a bandwidth problem) and the RIAA seem to be focusing on campuses. A judge probably would, but they won't buy the "fair use" bit if you're using a protocol that can upload to other clients.

I don't know if you're talking about the stable version(0.8.x) or the development one.
I don't have any of these anime files with complicated subtitles but they claim to have improved quite a bit their support for subtitles in the development version.
Try downloading a nightly build and see if its better

Maybe you should try to document a bit:

http://open.neurostechnology.com/content/vlc-porting-neuros-open-internet-television-hdplatform

http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2008-April/041720.html

"As 'open' itself states, all VLC source code files, new or modified during the porting, will be submitted to the central source code repository of the VideoLAN team, under the same license GPLV2 as the rest of the VLC source code."

Support of subtitles has greatly improved in development version of VLC: 0.9.0.

Many new subtitles type have been added as you can see here.
Moreover, SSA in mkv has been completely rewritten in latest Google Summer of Code: project page.

How about every single Linux user out there that watches a DVD via mplayer, xine, VideoLAN Client, or any other open source DVD/multimedia player?
Most of them simply use libdvdcss in order to access CSS encrypted content.

In regards to the PDF problem: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/ Sumatra PDF. Licensed under GPLv2. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php Foxit Reader. Not opensource, but does have forms support, among other things.

For media, I use http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ for DVDs, or Winamp for most everything else. All my mp3 players are USB Mass Storage, so I don't have to worry about special media management capabilities.

There's still not a decent movie player.

If codecs are an issue, why not just go grab VideoLAN? They have all sorts of Linux variants, including one for Fedora. I'm not an OSS junkie so I don't know if it's relevant to Fedora 9. However, windows doesn't exactly come with all of the codecs in the world either.

Maybe I misunderstood, though. My userID is over 1,000,000 which makes me a nub.

We all know that we can't install QuickTime anymore without installing iTunes. Now we have can't have iTunes unless we install Safari.

I suppose we can't have Adobe Flash player anymore without installing Adobe Reader next. (Don't get any ideas, Adobe!) We can't have Windows Media Player without Internet Explorer, or in that case Microsoft Vista (which sucks).

So here's what is going to happen to Apple now that I can't get Quicktime without iTunes and iTunes without Safari: I'm going to use VLC media player. And because VLC MP has a Mozilla plugin, I will be able to watch what in any format exect Real Player format (which I don't like because their Real Player Media files interfere with Redhat Package Manager packages).

Through the Videolan project, x264 is accepting SoC applications this year. We don't have many mentors though... so the competition will be tough!

Drop by #x264dev on Freenode and get involved in the qualification tasks before its too late... more information can be found here.

And about Windows Media player... this was on my desktop, not a workstation, so no group policy. I had installed VLC, and had it opening all my files, and defintely ogg. A few weeks later, I clicked on an OGG podcast and it opened up in Windows Media. Subsequent media (although I really don't do this often on my Windows machine) all opened in Windows media player.
Windows Media Player doesn't associate to OGG. Third party plug-ins could add registration for OGG to the player's file association set (I designed it to be easily extensible), but it doesn't come that way. So whomever actually did make that registration may have done that badly, but -- if it's going through my WMP association system, there's no mechanism for random re-registration ('reactivation') because you and I hate that.

However, at this point, I really don't care.
I do. If somebody is doing registrations badly, let's fix this up before people get confused. You're confused, and thus I'm concerned.

So hit me up on the email address I mentioned in my earlier response to you (zachdms at hotmail dotty com) and supply the repro steps here that are causing you to hit this badness. VLC definitely isn't really Vista file association aware, though, so that's the most probable source of error. If you check the VLC forums you'll note that I provided most of their solution already - I don't know if it's in their packages yet, though. Still, you did mention that it was a problem for a podcast, and that could be coming in through a different association path that VLC simply isn't currently handling. Pre-Vista, the split between shell and browser associations was rather a PITA - Vista finally generally consolidates those. Much easier to deal with.

I can't and don't want to speak to anything else other than Windows Media Player file associations, but since I designed that since maybe day one, it's always been my number one goal just to play nice and get out of your way and let you use the player that you want to. If you're seeing something else, somebody probably isn't plugging in properly. It's certainly possible that it's a Windows Media Player bug, but it's not malicious because I simply don't play like that. I grew up on the Mac, programmed on U*IX/Solaris in college, and regularly try to help any vendor that needs it. Email me, we should be able to sort this out.

I just use VLC as my default video player and be done with it. It plays practically everything without need of any silly codecs to be installed...

See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.

Nice try, but:

a technological measure `effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.

Once something has slipped into public domain, it no longer has a copyright owner to protect the rights of. The technical measures would still be in place, but they would not be given the force of law after the expiration. CSS, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, and to an extent AACS and BD+ have all been broken by groups working underground. If commercial entities would be able to reproduce public domain works for profit, the force behind the cracks would increase tenfold.

As much as I hate the DMCA, it doesn't give an indefinite term to copyright. I suppose it's possible that an unbreakable DRM could be created (though I doubt it), but that's not the force of law.

• It is a free cross-platform media player
• It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs
• It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...)

For the price of a video card with S-Video, Component Video or HDMI output (or alternatively, a TV with VGA or DVI input), VLC player by VideoLan.org puts you in control quite nicely.

I use Windows XP MediaCenter Edition as the centerpiece of my home AV setup, and in addition making you sit through unskippables, it, "due to restrictions set by the broadcaster," prohibits you from playing a commercial (CSS protected) DVD at higher than 480p resolution. VLC kept me from having to start over with Linux MCE or MythTV -- at least until I have the time to learn it thoroughly and do it right.

I just copy my home iTunes folder to a notebook drive in a USB enclosure, and take it to work.

Carrying disks?!? I just use Media Center to stream my audio and video over the internet from my server to whatever clients I like. I've used Media Center because of its single-click client-specific transcoding and its great tagging/smartlists. However, of late, I've been increasingly using VLC and Orb to stream more media to my phone. Anyway, the point is, carrying a physical disk is a postmodern sneakernet that should be left in the dustbin of history as soon as possible.