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To whom it may concern:


I am interested in politics - especially on the European level, because political decisions heavily influence the way we, citizens of the EU states, live. As have learnt through Slashdot, a news website [1], the Council of the EU has decided to offer a streaming media service.

In my opinion, this is a very interesting service with great potential to provide citizens with more information to actual issues.

Unfortunately, the stream is only avaiable in a proprietary format named Windows Media Video (WMV). In your frequently asked questions [2] you state that "[the] live streaming media service [...] supports [only] Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Netscape Navigator 6 and higher.", that "[the stream] can be viewed [only] on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms." and "[you] cannot support Linux in a legal way.".

As a user of free and open source software, this cought my attention. As a politically interested citizen, I would like to know why a proprietary (secret, probably patent-encumbered) format was chosen over an open video standard like Ogg Theora or XviD.

Proprietary formats, like WMV, are vendor-specific: They prevent or make it difficult for others to implement the specification. In this specific case, one has to download Windows Media Player, which is not avaiable for GNU/Linux, the operating system I am using. In constrast, open standards enable everyone to implement them: They are a vendor-agnostic, royalty-free and allow for a wide range of implementations. This can be compared to the analogue radio program, which can be heard with any radio, not just radios from microsoft.

As you can see, the use of a proprietary format is unfair, discriminatory behaviour against those who can not or do not want to use Microsoft Windows Media Player. The fact that this is done by a government entity makes it worse. In my opinion, gouvernment should not discriminate people - not even based on their choice of software. This is somehow a policital issue, but I doubt any reasonable citizen would oppose my position.

Most likely it is technically possible to offer the streaming media service in an open format to enable everyone with a capable computer and a good internet connection to watch it. You could do this, for example, with the free and open source software VLC Media Player [3], which is avaiable for a wide range of operating systems free of charge. Another way to provide wide access to your media stream could be the use of a java applet like Cortado (also free and open source software) which eliminates the need for a media player.


XXXX XXXX, a concerned citizen of the European Union


[1] http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=0& mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change&sid=214392
[2] http://ceuweb.belbone.be/faq.php?lang=EN
[3] http://videolan.org/
[4] http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/

You could try VLC or another software player that uses libdvdcss, but I think mac DVD drives implement the RPC2 region lock-out so it might not work.

Use the Video Downloader firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/

Then use VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ to play the resulting file.

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=29514&si d=8f1a64f43417c48f7a604af78287b378 Full screen controls are only on OSX for now.

1.9 Downloads a second!

But I think your post was waisted on the _only_ one user that has downloaded the source
http://www.videolan.org/stats/downloads.php

Hmmm... Let me guess - the "dos" commands say something like

# ./configure
# make
# make install

?

It sounds like you might have downloaded source code (no zip; had to open it in rar...)

The source has the extension ".tar.gz" or ".tar.bz2" and will be fairly useless to you, whilst running Windows.

It might be a good idea to download the Windows executable installer if you're running Windows...

FTP server(s) are up and running just fine: download here-ish (choose your release within).

Posted AC because people complain about karma whoring even when plus karma doesn't affect you anymore.

• VideoLAN primary mirror - France - Download (HTTP)
• VIA Centrale Reseaux, École Centrale Paris - France - Download (HTTP)
• Twente University - Netherlands - Download (HTTP)
• IRCAM - France - Download (HTTP)
• Université de Strasbourg - France - Download (FTP)
• Cr@ns, ENS Cachan - France - Download (FTP)
• Providence University - Taiwan - Download (FTP)
• Endpoint Corporation - Sweden - Download (FTP)
• Optralan - USA - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (HTTP)
• Brno University of Technology - Czech Republic - Download (FTP)
• Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná - Brazil - Download (FTP)

http://nightlies.videolan.org/ is still online

VideoLAN - VLC Media Player is an all-in-one open source and cross platform program which does much more than WMP: it's an user-friendly player, but also a powerful and flexible transcoder for almost every audio/video format and even a stream server supporting various network protocols.

Worth a try as a better replacement, especially for power users.

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

>> Our company did last year, cities of Vienna and Munich did, it should work out very nicely for you too. Our
>> former XP users love KDE.

You wouldn't be interested in sharing what KDE applications you left in your typical workstation setup? I'm guessing Firefox, open office stuff, evolution (or similar) and possibly GAIM or some other IM client.

What else did you leave in that you find people actually using that's not further confusing them, if you don't mind sharing (and even realize I asked because you [understandably] posted anon)?

VLC ( found here ) overcame the last hurdle I had with transitioning some client networks .. media playback was the breaking point in selling. Are you using it? How do the users seem to like it vs Media Player if so?

This goes out to any other anon cowards who would like to share (or non anon cowards, too!) :)

FFDShow is nice, but a pain in the ass to continue dealing with WMP. Kiss WMP goodbye for 90% of your videos. Use RealAlternative and QuicktimeAlternative for the other 9%. (1% still tend to need WMP... especially malformed MPGs.)

Why? Just use VideoLan, it's surely multiplatform.

from http://www.videolan.org/
Platforms:
        * Windows
        * Mac OS X
        * BeOS
        * Debian GNU/Linux
        * Ubuntu Linux
        * Mandriva Linux
        * Fedora Core
        * Familiar Linux

        * YOPY/Linupy
        * Zaurus
        * SUSE Linux
        * Red Hat Linux
        * WinCE / PocketPC
        * Slackware Linux
        * ALT Linux

For the other operating systems supported, there are no precompiled binaries. You will have to get the source code for VLC and its required libraries and build them yourself:

        * NetBSD
        * OpenBSD
        * FreeBSD
        * Solaris

        * QNX
        * Gentoo Linux
        * Crux Linux

You can also directly get the source code.

Now if you run another platform than those above, then you're probably smart enough to port the code as well.

As for me WMP9 is more than enough.

Download VLC, it can ignore the region encoding (...) Try it, it does work.

Jon wrote DeCSS; VLC (and basically all free software that can descramble DVDs) uses libdvdcss, a library part of the VideoLAN project. Check VideoLAN's page on libdvdcss or the Wikipedia article about it for more info.

NTSC is many things, but calling 320x240 "full resolution" is wrong. NTSC has several resolutions, all of which are considerably higher than 320x240.

The slingbox is awesome for $100, but VLC (and one of my favorites, the deprecated VLS) really has a leg up on the options it gives you. One of my favorite features is that it can transcode either a video file or input stream (from a capture card for example) into any other format it supports for playback, in realtime (as long as your CPU can handle it). I use it to stream 5 Mbit/sec video over wireless every day and it works and looks fantastic.

In my experience, VLC's lowest-end quality (for example, trying to send upstream on a crippled US cable modem or ADSL), looks far better than the highest quality available from a Slingbox. Other pluses are that VLC runs the same (and supports the same features and codecs) on all major operating systems and your stream will never be wrapped in DRM.

They based Google Video on a plug-in version of VLC until around sometime in Septmber of 2005.

I worked at a company in the mid 90's that made their own hardware and software for ad-insertion on live broadcats. Rolling your own scheduling software isn't that hard. This is a short list of things that you have to think of to get a broad grasp of what software and hardware you need.

1. The output, does it need to be digital or analog?
1.1. If digital, you may need hw that's capable of switching live digital streams, can be expensive.
1.2. If analog, you need a quality MPEG2 card that can synch it's signal to an incoming videosignal, or possibly use a TBC to ensure good quality timing on the output (a TBC does probably already exists somwhere in the headend).
1.3 Make sure that the playback hardware support bugs (ie. logos) and overlays.
1.4 Compare different hardware to find what suits your needs. Try to buy hardware from well-known vendors and make sure that it works for the OS of your choice.
2. Ensure you have a extremely good MPEG2 encoder, if you are going to use Mac's I recommend the software BitVice (http://www.innobits.se/) since it doesn't change color/light levels at all. You probably need a small encoder farm for realistic encode times. Also, you need at least a couple of hardware encoders for real time encoding of live material or material that needs to encoded ASAP.
3. VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) can be part of the solution to distribute and playback the material. Have multiple machines for playback. It's also possible to use mplayer. Always queue up material in ram (ie. ramdisk) before playing to avoid "burping", try to avoid streaming over the network.
4. You will need to have an integrated backend software that control everything automaticly, ie. queue material up for encoding, controlling the playback of the schedule, producing logs of aired commercials for billing purposes, backing up data & logs, moving material from your videobank to the playback machines in a timely fashion.
5. Make sure you have a good monitoring software that can give you a heads up on potential problems like diskspace, network congestion, disks about to fail, temperatures etc etc.
6. You will need to have a scheduling system that's quite flexible and easy to use. It should be able to use pre-programmed templates to speed up daily and weekly scheduling. It should also should have a "sales-portion" where the sales department easily can tentavily book ads and airing times depending on the planned airing schedule. It will also need a "breaking news" function where you can pause/skip the planned schedule during live broadcats that's unplanned. It also should have automatic fail-over to another instance if something breaks. You also have to consider what to use as a "presentation layer", should it be web-based or should it use some kind of graphical GUI. Usually your and your users needs dictates this. If you contract a company or a developer for this software make sure you have a very detailed specification of what you want. The more detailed the specification on how the system should be used and how it should work the faster the sofware will be built. Also, make sure the software includes automatic stand-alone testing (ie. some kind of unit testing) of it variuos parts so you easily can test them without having a complete system.
6.1. Also, contemplate on what information and control the controlroom should have from the software.
7. Reduncy, reduncy & reduncy. Nothing costs more than not being able to broadcasts sold ads, both in lost income and badwill. Have 2 separated networks, run the cabling separate from each other, don't use the same routers/switches for the networks unless necessary. Preferably you should have twin datacenters whith their own UPS's too. It all depends on how much money you want to dump on the infrastructure versus the risk of not beeing able to broadcast.
8. Infrastructure, as I mentioned before, is very importantat. Think it through, consult with people who know storage, netw

Look at Blackmagic Design or AJA for there cards. The card itself appers as an video card to the os, so you can run VLC or another player on that screen. This way you get an SDI signal out of it.

If you can accept an analog component signal then look into a nvidia card which has component output under linux from there drivers.

Talk to the folks over at VideoLAN. The software is very robust and runs on any OS. Check the fora or get on the streaming mailing list.

Talk to the folks over at VideoLAN. The software is very robust and runs on any OS. Check the fora or get on the streaming mailing list.

Talk to the folks over at VideoLAN. The software is very robust and runs on any OS. Check the fora or get on the streaming mailing list.

I think you are Looking for the Video Lan project, specifically the VLC player:

VLC

For video, I have better luck(on Windows XP) with the various FFMpeg based players(VLC, mplayer) than I do with directshow(Windows Media Player, winamp, etc). They don't do drm, but the codec support and fault tolerance is way better. They at least try to play broken video files, which is a big improvement over WMP. FFDShow installs FFMpeg as a directshow filter, giving you access to the codecs in the gui of your choice.

Links:

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/tiki-view_ articles.php

http://developers.videolan.org/x264.html

...play most video formats with a single simple player that treats files of the same extension all alike (.mkv and .avi will not play the same in all players), and the ability to play DVDs, etc,...

Mplayer? VLC?

You might want to try VideoLAN - VLC media player. I thought QuickTime was pretty good until I tried the VLC player.

Sounds like an opening for competition against Media Player. If WMP is shipped brain damaged, what's to stop 3rd party apps from doing full HD payback instead?

VideoLan anyone? http://www.videolan.org/

You do know that CSS has worked for years don't you. Even in the US I don't think anyone would notice if you downloaded the software.

*skip unless u want to hear my negative opinions on Real.

I have no time to read an article about Real networks, but i will take the time to state how much i dislike it.
Real media has been one of the most annoying web technologies since it came out. For instance: trying to sneak in lame apps and silly toolbars during the install. Trying to hi-jack file permissions.. Winamp has always delivered better quality, free and less annoying content.
It is just about worthless as a media player when compared to VLC or any number of other players.
The only thing Real had going was content protection,.. but now streaming with flash (youtube, pornotube, google.video, ect.) is cake so they do not even have that. I can see why they would be trying to give the app to anybody who will take it.

the last place i want to see it is in a linux distro.

hrm... what else.. it's ugly & stinks too! /end rant

Video Lan client

Installing Videolan ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) is the easiest solution : all the codecs are included, and it will work just as well on either Linux or Windows. Who wants to change his/her applications just because he/she changes the operating system running under ? No kidding ! This is 2006, folks, not 1996 anymore !

VLC plays WMV files, so one doesn't have to use WMP. As an added bonus, it doesn't use external codecs, so no more codec pack bloat for me.

Uh, yeah. Are you talking about the UI? A lot of UI stuff in OS X do not require any coding at all, you just use interface builder. There are a plethora of applications and utilities out there for OS X which interface command line OSS with an Aqua UI.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itheater
http://www.videolan.org/
http://freshmeat.net/browse/839/
Do a search for OS X on sourceforge, you will find some mac specific applications but also a lot of cross platform projects and projects which merely provide a graphical UI for command line tools Mpegtools.

BTW, that's FS/OS. Not everyone agrees with gun-toting racists and the OSI does not represent those with morals.
What the hell are you talking about? Who are you accusing of being a gun-toting racists? How are you representing the open source movement when you go off on such an insane tangent?

Just use the Ogg link. I'd assume those work in Windows as well provided you using a good media player like VLC.

VideoLan: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ works with DVD's from any region without changing the drives region lock.

Hate me for pointing out a MS product

Have you tried VLC Its basicly a no-frils media-player that runs on everything and plays almost-any file type. Its one of my favourites, as it does playing songs and does it well (well it also streams stuff and converts between formats, but it doesn't shove all the extra stuff in your face) see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player

> CVS is as likely to break your application and introduce new bugs as it is to fix bugs from previous releases.

It depends how the project is setup. Some projects have two CVS directories, usually, 'stable' and.. something else that symbolises the word 'experimental'.

If you're using one of those projects, the 'stable' should pretty much only have bug fixes in it, while experimental have all the new features and doodads etc.

> In general, CVS should be considered unstable and the majority of users

Yes, it should, but at least they know, when it's fixed in CVS, that means in the next release, it will be fixed. They also know, that they can try to fix the bug themselves if they want or try out the code in CVS.

> Which of course, compiling from CVS isn't going to help in any short order.

I'd like to point out, that some projects (like VideoLan) have nightly builds. So one may not need to compile these things. It depends on the project.

Read: Nightly Builds
Not everyone releases them, but those projects that do, "hey, that was fixed yesterday, visit the nightlies page (e.g. http://nightlies.videolan.org/) and grab the latest"

• 1024x576
• 425MB (Bittorrent)
• 425MB (USA #1)
• 425MB (USA #2)
• 425MB (Australia)
• 425MB (Germany)
• 425MB (Netherlands)

Only playable in: VLC Media Player MPlayer

Young guy downloads VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

VLC will do all of those right out the box.

...version 6 (6.4 specifically, I think) was when WiMP essentially reached maturity.

Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons...

Microsoft should take a hint from VLC or mplayer, and realize that we don't want the useless junk they're piling on. The reason why VLC and mplayer are so great is they do one thing and do it well: play media. Period.

I guess there are strategic reasons for having an all-in-one video/audio player, but I haven't seen a good implementation/interface yet. Maybe version 11 will get it right, but I have doubts. I think Microsoft would have been better off separating Media Player into two apps: Windows Video Player and Windows Music Player. For now, I'll keep using MPC for video and foobar2000 (with Columns UI) for music.

If I recall, this version of VLC to which you refer is not technically a universal binary but, rather, has been precompiled for Windows. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Its all about VLC. It sometimes works kinda weird on my mactel but its a pretty good Quicktime replacement.