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The Next Generation of XAnim
You don't hear much about xanim anymore, but it's certainly an old stand by (FAQ: Yes, you can use it to play cinepak encoded movies if you have a few closed source modules). But are you curious about what's happening with old faithful?
rsk noted that the
next generation xanim featurelist is online. It's not ready yet, but it's nice to see an update.
Any video news on Linux is good. The video players suck under it. RP Alpha is the only one that's passable. MTV is ok, but it's too small (window size, unadjustable) and stops working after a few minutes. The remaining ones freeze up and go too slow and are generally not high-quality. If there was finally an all-in-one video/media player for Linux that actually worked, it would be a boon to the community.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
As psergiu said, "polite".
Have a look at gstreamer. It's a media framework just like xanim wants to be, but it has these advantages:
Currently it supports about a lot of the input/output options that xanim says it will support. There are just a few developers working on it. If you can lend a hand I'm sure they would love it.
--
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
This is nice to see but xanim, even with all those new listed features, is still years behind MS Media Player. Its not important that something just play avis anymore. It needs to have support for popular codecs (Divx and such). Ive never seen anybody in their right mind encode something in cinepak if they want it to be less than 1GB for an hour. I admit that iim not familiar with implementing codecs into a piece of software like this, but speasking as a person who has every episode of DS9 encoded on CD in Divx, I would never encode something in cinepak. And until Xanim (or whatever they decide to call it in the future) can play my eps, MS Media Player is still lightyears ahead.
skyfish
(dedicated debian user)
Did anyone miss me.
--Shoeboy
And every time someone emailed him about it, Cmdr Taco delayed the Slash code release 24 hours!
* Quicktime for Linux does [rare] MJPEG encoded Quicktime for Linux
* Xanim doesn't fully support MPEG1
* SMPEG is also only MPEG 1 based
* XMovie does MPEG2
* AviFile is an interface for MS-MPEG4, among others
* Livid [library] and OMS [player] plays DVD movies
* RealPlayer plays RealMedia content and nothing else
Each of these libraries implements the same features over and over again. Different rendering modes, resampling for screen sizes, fullscreen mode, player interfaces and skinning, plugins [visualization, etc] etc.
This is a massive duplication of effort and [unlike similar duplications of effort] neither project covers the full spectrum of whats ouyt there [compare this to KDE - GNOME, which both happily run whatever apps are out there providing the libraries are installed].
We need to put a standard for pluggable codecs / extensions [an extension being a parent for other codecs - eg, the AviFile version of WINE, or a non-Real interface for RealPlayer codec]. Perhaps integrate it into SDL if appropriate.
The result would be a standard api [which a number of players could be used on top of] suitable for Audio and Video, and easily extensible. Can the developers of all the projects mentioned in this thread start please talking to each other?
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Qmail is NOT open source software, by any definition of the term. The author has never accepted patches that I know of, explicitly forbids the distribution of modified versions, and will never, ever permit a fork.
And frankly, that's probably a good thing, as it's the reason why qmail is not the horrid mess that sendmail is and that postfix seems hell-bent on becoming.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
RealNetworks sucks anyway. See this article.
But with DivX ;-), isn't QuickTime dead? Sorenson or any other codec? OK, the AVI / DivX ;-) combination is not streamable, but for Star Wars trailers, TV show episodes or movies you don't really need streaming anyway. I hope the promised 2nd generation will come up with something easy to use that is *free* and available on all platforms. No more closed codecs...
It's similar to the Napster philosophy - "sharing is good as long as I get more than I give" type thing.
I hobby-code in a fairly competative field. We're all cooperative, but I only like to distribute version x of my code after I've started using version x+1, which is faster/better of course. Share - but only so much.
Donc je m'accuse.
Sue me.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm sad to see the vast number of different sound and video players available for Linux/Unix - xanim, aviplay, smpeg, xmms, mpg123 etc. All with a different set of supported encodings. When is someone going to do it ``The right way'', and define a codec interface for loadable modules. Then these codecs could easily be integrated into your favourite full-screen player, web browser etc. Futhermore, it would be impossible to provide all codecs open-source. With a standardized interface, commercial codec providers would have an easy job supplying codecs for the linux community.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot by reinventing this with every few weeks by providing a new player for your specific format.
-larsch
w/ wine and the dll, anything is possible. look at how avifile handles divx; it lets the dlls handle the video encoding/decoding. whether it's legal or not, however, is the question you should be asking. the divx dlls are basically freeware; what's the licensing on the dlls used to handle the formats you're talking about?
it's actually avifile which he speaks of. avifile is a lib, that can comes w/ avifile, and can be used by other thing (such as xmps or xmms) to play avis.. aviplay is a QT-based player that utilizes the library. it, of course, included with avifile. i'm not sure whether it's supposed to be more than just an example of HOW to use libavifile (i got the impression that it wasn't), but it's definitely the most featureful avi player available.
Jane and Joe mightn't care, but that doesn't mean it's not important. It also doesn't mean that noone cares.
Sue Secretary certainly cares when Word and Windows continually makes her day a misery. How she wished that she could get her boss to hire a freelance programmer to fix the bugs that _really_ irritate her! Unfortunately, her boss would love to spend a bit of money to allow her to be more productive, but it's just plain impossible to fix bugs in Word or Windows. Worst of all, Microsoft aren't supporting these versions anymore, and so won't fix the bugs. Sue's boss would much rather give money to a programmer who can fix their problems than to the company who has abandoned them, but he has no choice.
Don't be a dick. These things really do make a difference to normal, everyday people in normal, everyday ways. Not caring about them is like not caring about what kind of insurance you have on your house/car/whatever.
I'm getting sick of the "what about your car's code?" question. Realise that free software is designed for general purpose computers, like PCs, as opposed to embedded, special purpose stuff. It may also apply to these things, but I dunno, I haven't thought about it enough yet.
On first glance, there does appear to be some merit for it, at least once a model of car has been discontinued. If you drive an older car, one before all this computerized gadgetry became embedded in them, then it's relatively easy for you to fix your car when it breaks. You can go to any spare parts place and get what you need, and failing that you can probably fashion it yourself out of sheet metal or a similar model or something.
But if it's the embedded computer which needs fixing, and the car company has told you that they don't support your car anymore (and so won't sell you spare parts), you're substantially more fucked. In fact, you're basically stuck with the proverbial car-with-hood-welded-shut. It's the computer, not the hood, that's welded shut, but the effect is the same. If the car company had decided to release the source and specs to your car as free software, then you and other owners of your car, perhaps with similar problems, could fix it. Hell, you could even make it better, fix any bugs or tweak things to be exactly how you like them! The patches and tools could be available on the Internet. If you can't do it, then you could hire someone to do it for you - techies could make a living doing this kind of thing on weekends. It's really the same as Sue Secretary's case.
Like I said before, don't be a dick.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
A lot of people are trivializing this article as "just another software announcement" - and an old one at that. True, "Slashdot is not Freshmeat!" But I say it's much more than that. I don't have the URL handy, but there was recently a survey of current Windows users (including CEOs, CTOs, and IT admins). The subject was "Given that UNIX is considered much more stable than Windows, why not migrate?"
IIRC, about 4% said a move to a UNIX-based OS would result in incompatibility issues. Another 7% mentioned having to retrain employees. But approximately 84% replied that UNIX - and Linux in particular - has no support for viewing pornography in a video form. One Fortune 500 exec noted that the online porn industry is rapidly migrating to streaming video because of the high availability of bandwidth. Until Linux, BSD, etc. decide to support this vital part of the market, Microsoft will continue to dominate.
yes, of course I'm kidding
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
After downloading the trailer from the official site, and trying to play with xanim I get:
$ xanim finalfantasy_320.mov
XAnim Rev 2.80.0 by Mark Podlipec Copyright (C) 1991-1999. All Rights Reserved
Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18)
Unknown(and unsupported) Audio Codec: QDM2(0x51444d32).
Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
Usage:
XAnim [options] anim [ [options] anim
-h lists some common options, but may be out of date.
See xanim.readme or the man page for detailed help.
:(
I noticed this is going to be under a proprietary "free for non-comm" license.
Are there any gpl'd players out there that will:
1) Use the video4linux api;
2) play realtime onscreen with controls;
3) optionally create a video file (prefer mpeg but others are ok).
TIA.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Apple will likely not produce a working version of quicktime with sorensen for a long time. Apple is the only person who can produce this since they practically own the format through a very restrictive agreement with sorensen. AVI will also likely never be completely supported under linux (natively that is) simply because AVI is a wrapper format much like wav (ever seen those mp3 files that are wav files). AVI is simply a file format wrapper around hundreds of codecs (from DV, indeo*, mpeg4, mpeg2, etc. ) Quicktime is similar to this, but without as many formats, nearly all newer ones use the sorensen codec. If you look around you can find avis that aren't supported in linux or other OSes outside of windows. Media player will check its website on missing avi codecs and download the specific codec needed automagically. If you want to create videos seen on nearly every platform, do it with mpeg1. It's the only decently safe format out there. Hopefully mpeg4 (when native codecs arrive) will completely replace it. This isn't an attempt at a troll, but an attempt to educate the readers on what is possible and what isn't possible. Sure it's possible that apple will release quicktime for linux, but not for a long while until its worth their time and people treat them with respect instead of acting like 13 year old skript kiddies.
if you try to play a sorenson enocded quicktime file, xanim dies with the message that it cant yet play sorenson encoded quicktime and hopes to in the future. i also hope they will in the future or i wish mac would realize there is a large (large enuf anyways) target market who would love to see sorenson encoded quicktime. some who might even pay..
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Because people make typos when they are typing with just one hand.
yes, exactly what im talking about. wouldnt it be nice to see arguable (or not) the best cg ever made?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Next Generation ? It will still be 3 generations behind :-)
is....s.o...jer....ky....th..at...I...use....x..mo ..vie
pr0n is more of a geek term than one for l33t-haX0rZ -- look it up in The New Hacker's Dictionary
Don't release it then; I won't use it. I can frankly do without streaming video and my favorite radio station (WFMU) has MP3 streams.
What these companies keep forgetting is that the multitude of incompatible streams and players will soon eclipse bandwidth as the single greatest reason that streaming on the 'Net is a waste of time. Then, one day, Ogg's video codec or something similar will put that whiny project lead out of a job.
Good for him.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
A lot of comments are saying "who needs xanim?", but right now it looks like the only player that supports RTSP+RTP+H.263, the only documented and standardized way to do streaming video.
But it's too bad it won't be Open Source.
Where could I get aviplay? I did a search for it but couldn't find it...
Here's a prediction for you. In a few years time, when Linux and other Free OSes have a very substantial market share, every company and their dog will be barking to port their stuff to these platforms. Presently, these companies doesn't need Linux, but I think there'll come a time when they do. When that time comes, they'll have no choice but to submit and make their stuff Free, because they will want to get their stuff on Linux but will cop "hostility" if it's not Free.
And rightly so. If they want to get onto this bandwagon and reap the rewards, then they need to be prepared to play by our rules or else be shoved off. They would fight if we tried to enter their proprietary software arena and not play by the rules, after all. They shouldn't be surprised that people using Free OSes want Free software to play movie files.
Apple (and others like them) shouldn't be surprised if their current attitude puts them in a worse situation in the future.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Yes I'm going to feed the troll now. Yes I'm certain.
/. is kinda hard without Internet access) and not realize that WinME and Win2k are busy trying to wreck the software world. The "to-do" list of XAnim isn't all that well-publicized. Most people check up on this one as often as they check up on, say, XV or linux-utils. It's news.
The thing is, this isn't some highly-publicized event like the rollout of Win95. You'd have to have been in some backwaters part of the world to have missed Microsoft's media blitz on that one. Certainly, it would be hard to be on the net (reading
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
xawtv.
apt-get install xawtv
quality is so-so (could be the card) but it will vidcap 12fps (avi format) on a 400mhz box, and display what appears to be full speed.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I read the webpage, but it doesn't say if it will finally support the Sorensen codec for quicktime or not (biggest reason to browse in windows besides windows media player).
On a related note, does anybody know if it is at all possible (via wine or something) to listen to windows media player streams in Linux ? I find that honestly Realplayer streams blow chunks, and I would really love to listen tp WMP streams instead (www.com is a perfect example)
-- the cake is a lie
There's no reason to use xanim, except possibly for partial quicktime support.p hp3"
;-) codec. This is a jaw-dropping piece of software.
<p>
MPEG is very well supported with the <a href="http://www.lokigames.com/development/smpeg.
SMPEG library</a>, thanks to loki<a
There's even a plugin for xmms that works quite well.
<p>
AVI's are _fully_ support with <a href="http://divx.euro.ru/"> avifile</a>. I mean fullscreen, full frame rate support of ever avi filetype, including the DivX
<p>
There's even a project called <a href="http://xmps.sourceforge.net/">XMPS</a> which takes smpeg, avifile, and a couple other programs and puts them into one great piece of software.
<p>
So why do we need xanim?
Since Apple doesnt seem to be doing anything about the linux community anytime soon, i wonder if there are any plans in the works to make xanim able to play sorenson encoded quicktime files..
all those pretty trailers like Final Fantasy (The Movie.) Its the best cg ive ever seen, but i cant watch it because xanim wont play it.
And all those funny commercials on adcritic. is there maybe a way using windows dll's or something?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
DivX audio is (usually, read always) just mp3.
Though, I believe it is technically possible to use just about any codec, it's an AVI file after all - just needs the player program to understand the codec in use.
I've never gotten Xanim to work properly.
One great alternative though, is xtheater, which can play DIVX AVI files, and last time I checked, Microsoft's ASF (Not reliably thought...)
Check it out at http://xtheater.sourceforge.net.
I suppose everybody here knows about aviplay (DivX is a fast way to make yourself popular) but although it uses .dll and
other "non open source" resources who cares?
After reading the XAnim page it's obvious
that the player won't be GPL (at least since
the beginning) and that it will keep using those
precompiled modules to play certain formats.
Latest aviplay (0.50) can even play DivX sound,
and they are working hard on support encoding (not
too reliable at this moment), soon we will all be able to backups our DVDs from Linux. If only we
would have got a decent DVD player... how many
nightmares the RIAA could have avoided ...
Regards,
- german
PS: you can found aviplay at http://divx.euro.ru
This is just a wishlist. It is not an update. There are very many of these tiny obsolete little stories that no one cares about. Why did it make it to slashdot...?
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Is your sig file boring?
That was a whole lot of masturbating about free software but somehow I didn't see any real examples or facts. Like how most linux multimedia players bite my ass. Xanim can't even play standard mpegs from www.nineinchnails.net. Cinepak is a horrible old codec for quicktime, I'm not even sure who still uses it. All the other players might work, but just barely. I tried viewing a vcd mpeg at full screen and the framerate dropped almost 50%!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This planned feature list is not 'news', but that's not my point. I last checked up on the latest version of xanim months ago because I was trying to find something that would play mpegs properly, and thought that a new version might be able to do so. The answer was no, but I did find this feature list, which does not appear to have changed much since I saw it then. This project appears to be quite sluggish.
Once the new swiss-army-knife-xanim actually gets released, then let us know.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
This has been on the website for months, I saw it back in July or August when I wanted to download the "old standby".
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
I've never been able to get xanim movies to play at more than a few frames per second without adjusting the speed manually (and that's inaccurate, to say the least). Has anyone else had this problem?
I have no ide how hard that would be, though. Somebody should reverse engineer those binary modules of xanim too. With access to the xanim source that should be easier.
Aviplay is actually a Linux iomplementation of...welll....aviplay, a Windows multimedia API made by Microsoft. It uses small chunks of Windows based source code to provide the environment a Windows based codec expects, then provides a native Linux interface for players [most notably aviplay player] to plug into. It works surprisingly well.
;-)
;-) Audio
Here's the full list os supported codecs...note the Microsoft ones.
ATI VCR-2
Cinepak®
DivX
Indeo® Video 3.2, 4.1, 5.0
Microsoft MPEG-4
Motion JPEG ( based on rather slow libjpeg, so not yet very usable )
Audio:
DivX
Microsoft GSM 6.10
IMA ADPCM
MSN Audio
MPEG Layer-1,2,3 Audio
PCM
On an unrelated note - RealPlayer for Linux is version 7 and won't play any of the recent media streams. Time to add Real to your Book of Grudges again.
Unfortunately, neither of these will play the stuff that I really want to see, like the Lord of the Rings Trailer or the D&D movie trailer. I'm forced to fall back to VMWare for that. Damn Quicktime...
For playing mpeg, I highly recommend getting smpeg from loki. www.lokigames.com
It's much better than mpegtv, and it is GPLed.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
O P E N___S O U R C E___H U M O R
great comedy company.
avifile may read divx's, but it certainly doesn't work for all windows video CODECs. Have you ever tried getting it to use one other than those it comes bundled with - I hav't been able to get a single additional one to work - then all fail in different ways.
Still, if you do want to use avifile, aviplay and XMPS are not the best players. Try LAMP or XTheatre instead.
There are better options for MPEG also. SMPEG only works for MPEG-1 (as does mtvp). For MPEG-2, try xmovie, xine, or the VideoLan client.
There's also at least 3 Open Source divx (i.e. MPEG-4) CODEC efforts that I'm aware of - I submitted the story yesterday, but it was rejected.
MTV will play full-screen and only quits after a little bit if you don't pay for it. The command line tool (mtvplay, IIRC) isn't restricted, but doesn't have nice controls (just plays.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Video for linux is one of the many things that isnt up to par (among the others is gaming stuff). I've been using mpeg tv, which honestly is just awful. The gui version doesnt work at all, and the command line version is desynced completely. Plus, its proprietory. If xanim can get those last modules opensourced, I know i'll be a hooked user.
I am !amused.
...When Soccer Mom Jane and Joe Six-Pack have web enabled pads (running Linux) on the back of the mini-van's bucket seats (for the kids, of course) no one is going to care one way or the other what the source code's clickthrough says.
Come to think about it, what about the code in the car you drive? Aren't you 'upset' that it too isn't open source?
Dear Sir / Madam
Today, many video clips are powered by the Sorenson codec. I notice that there are decoders / viewers for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, yet there are none for GNU/Linux and UNIX in general.
There is a UNIX video stream player called 'Xanim', found at http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/ . This program has the ability to plugin binary decoder modules, to allow playback of many different codecs. I note that the Sorenson codec is not among them.
Because of Xanim's ability to accept binary modules, the source code to your codec does not need to be revealed to anyone. Please consider supporting the Linux and UNIX communities by providing a module for Xanim. We all look forward to watching videos powered by Sorenson!
Regards
My name here
The last thing we need is them refusing, on account of rude people emailing them...
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Is that an African or European swallow?
Looks like you morons got a beowolf cluster of first posts going
Anonymous cowards aren't supposed to have sigs... no wait a minute... huh?
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Is your sig file boring?