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".

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

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.

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