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Microsoft Plans Media Player for Linux?
theancient1 writes "According to this article, Microsoft is considering releasing a Linux version of Windows Media Player. 'Paul Boudreau, Microsoft's programme manager for music and entertainment, said at a briefing on the software giant's plans for digital media: We see a need for Unix players and are working in that direction, including Linux.' Of course, a little quote is quite a bit different from actually seeing a product, but it's still not exactly expected."
This is the old vaporware trick all over again. M$ are affraid a good OSS video viewer will emerge on Linux. Thus they announce an upcoming version of the MediaPlayer so no one will bother to write/perfect an OSS version.
All mistakes in spelling and grammar are licensed under the GPL.
a sig with any other name would be as witty
As a result of the last /. article on the need for streaming media I (1) checked out icecast (1b) compiled it from source (2) tried out XMMS's streaming mp3 feature (2b) compiled it from source (3) spent a couple of hours listening to broadcast audio from greenwitch (4) figured out how to make netscape start the webcast automatically, just by clicking on the .mpu link.
The XMMS streaming audio is solid as a rock. Even without using the realtime priority feature, I couldn't get it to skip. (I guess I could if I tried *really* hard) The audio quality is superb - considering the bit rate and the miniscule speakers on my laptop. Gosh, that equalizer helps, and they do a lovely job of compression-amplifying. If you've been turned off by crappy streaming audio from Realnetworks, you have to try this.
My conclusion is, this totally rocks, and we don't need Microsoft's help in getting streaming media on Linux. Just the opposite I'd say. What we need to do is (1) beat on more sites to give us streaming mp3 (or we won't bloody go to your site, thanks) (2) give the people that are working on free video codecs for Linux all the support we can.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.