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.

Comments

Re:Quicktime codecs ?

[update()]

It's worth mentioning, though, that overzealous "advocacy" is part of the reason Apple hasn't released a Linux QuickTime player. There was a post on a QuickTime list from one of the project leads describing his frustration with hate mail from Linux users and his impression that the large majority believe they are entitled to everything on their terms and that a binary-only Linux release would have generated more hostility and bad press than benefit to Apple. (Sorry, no URL. Apple is changing their listservers and the archive isn't up yet.)

As psergiu said, "polite".

Too much duplication of effort

[Nailer]

* 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?

---

not trivial

[dboyles]

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

pr0n.

[Lemmy Caution]

Because people make typos when they are typing with just one hand.

Re:why use xanim?

[ywwg]

There's no reason to use xanim, except possibly for partial quicktime support.

MPEG is very well supported with the SMPEG library, thanks to loki. There's even a plugin for xmms that works quite well.

AVI's are _fully_ support with avifile. I mean fullscreen, full frame rate support of ever avi filetype, including the DivX ;-) codec. This is a jaw-dropping piece of software.

There's even a project called XMPS which takes smpeg, avifile, and a couple other programs and puts them into one great piece of software.

So why do we need xanim?

XAnim is a bit obsolete ... try aviplay

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Quicktime codecs ?

[psergiu]

Go to the unsupported xanim codecs page and read why you can not play sorenson video in linux. And send a polite mail to Sorenson asking them why they do not support anything else than mac and win.

Maybe a gazilion polite e-mails from the /. ppl which will make their e-mail server crash'n'burn will be a good proof that un*x has a large enough market for their technology.

--

Re:why use xanim?

[JabberWokky]

Because it's open source. You've been reading Slashdot for long enough now to know that a particular CODEC or software need not be "stable" or "compatible with anything" or even "work". As long as it's Open Source, the greatest thing ever!

Okay... I'm friggin tired of this attitude. Yes, it is *damn* important that it's Open Source. Did you ever think in your tiny little mind that there *might* just be something that you aren't getting about Open Source/Free Software?

It's not the quality... for every quality comparison where Open Source wins (Apache vs. IIS 4.0, BSD Networking vs. the rest of the world), there is another where closed source wins (Any DTP program).

The difference is that Open Source is a not a magic bullet to quality, but rather places the onus of quality on the userbase. It's not about free software, it's about the potential of Free software.

Look around... not counting the people who use Linux on faith (either because it's trendy, or because someone they trust told them to try it), most users of Linux are people who make a living using computers. Most are people who have a serious personal investment in computing. And they choose Linux. It's hard to explain to someone who isn't a developer (heck, it takes time for even a computer developer) why XML is better than a binary file -- i.e., why open standards are better than propietary. Why the following is worse than 20k of code to read an XML file (pseudocode ahoy!):

struct foo {
int head,
int torso,
char lleg,
char rleg
}

write(fp,foo,sizeof(foo))

It's faster, smaller, leaves a smaller footprint... why not use it? For the exact same reason Linus refuses to change the /proc fs to binary read files. There is a philosophy inherent that is time tested, and experience shows that will result in more work at first, and less work later.

And that's what both Open Source and Free Software are... philosophies that pay back later. Some of it pays off now (gimp, Konqueror, qmail), but it's the potential that, once it hits critical mass, will pay off in the future.

--
Evan "Typed hurriedly, not proofread, as I need to catch a train..." E.