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Quicktime Under Linux With MPlayer
Sark writes: "The latest version of the controversial MPlayer program for
Linux supports Quicktime .mov files with the latest codecs.
Apart from the closed source program Crossover, this is the first
open source program that seems to work. Check out the Mplayer
homepage for more info." According to
formats page, Sorenson
Quicktime is still not gonna happen any time soon.
huh!?
Whats the point?
[shamelessly lifted from a post in a different article]
Quicktime is a wrapper format for a number of codecs, just like AVI. An actual Quicktime file is almost invariably encoded in the Sorenson file format, which is is exclusively licensed to Apple. MPlayer can probably never play this format!
Don't Panic
Xanim's supported Quicktime .mov files forever, just not the Sorensen codec. Of course, many of Xanim's modules don't have source code available either, due to IP issues. Also, its mpeg capabilities are questionable at best. Since I got the DSL line in, I usually just look for mpegs anyway and play them with gtv or plaympeg.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have to say MPlayer and the folks working on it have done a great job, It is really nice stuff, although I think the project would benifift from a refined build process, building it with all the dependencies can be a bit of fun the first time around, divx, dvd, blah blah blah. I dont know if there is a simpole method of doing this with all the complie options.
I really love the GCC 2.96 RedHat warning, if you havent built it yet, HEED that warning.
Is there no chance the RIAA et al can shut this down being out of hungary? I hope not its becoming a wonderful piece of software.
Congrats to the guys making MPlayer happen !!
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Why r these guys controversal? I read up on their site, they are trying to do the best they can to make a good movie app for linux... should they not include features b/c they are not fully opensource?? Dont let you politics about open/closed source keep linux out of the video world.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
'Taco's real up on things, can't you tell? I've been playing .mov files (not the sorenson codec) for quite a while now using xanim. Try http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html
Politics, Culture, Food?
You know, if Linux video software would come as Debian packages, I would be really happy. Currently, if I want anything with avifile or something, I need to compile it myself - and I don't want to mess with the source because avifile API isn't exactly solid yet and source that compiled yesterday doesn't work today. Linux video support Isn't Here, dammit.
The mplayer author seems to be aware of the Marillat's unofficial .debs... and now whines that people are violating his "thou shalt not distribute Binaries" lisence.
I don't want to compile the package myself. I want binaries.
Source-only distribution is fine, as long as you let somebody make the pre-built binaries available so that we lazy bastards can use the program. I know I can compile mplayer if I'm positively motivated, but I know my mother couldn't.
This is why I'm considering using VideoLanClient instead of mplayer - at least it's under GPL and I'm able to get "official" Debian packages for it.
What exactly is supposed to be so controversial about this program? I've been using it for a month and a half now and I think it is great. The addition of quicktime support means fewer reboots into windows just to watch some silly movie or another. As for the sorenson business, I'd like to think that eventually MPEG-4 (DiVX) will overtake whatever hold this compression codec has. Open standards tend to win out over proprietary ones, even when the proprietary one is technically superior. Just look at what happened with Betamax vs. VHS.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It would be news if it supported Sorenson at all. We already have a number of applications to chose from that will play non-Sorenson quicktime back, xanim being the first that I ever knew of. Quicktime for Linux project has all sorts of stuff that is non-Sorenson. Sorenson playback has always been the gotcha that matters.
The only thing I can see is if they can use the Windows binary code to decode the Sorenson without the huge performance hit of running the entire player within a Wine context, and having the added benefit of XVideo availability for Sorenson playback. But it doesn't look like this will be the case.
More noteworthy is the VIVO support and xanim support, the VIVO support is a first (AFAIK) under linux natively, and the xanim support really helps bridge the gap between new and old-school media playback, xanim gets a lot of those files that have been overlooked in the "new wave" of media players for linux...
Also, another nit-pick, the crossover plugin, as such is not so much a player, but a nicely done wine modification within which the Windows Quicktime player runs... You can use the latest Wine CVS repository in much the same way (outside a browser at least).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apple has released the specs for almost every aspect of the Quicktime (.mov) standard. They rarely write their own codecs though.
The Sorenson codec is owned by Sorenson and Apple pays for it. If you want to get a legal player for a non-Win/Mac platform someone will either have to
1. reverse engineer the codec(legally questionable and hard)
2. write a wrapper that uses another OSs Code (crossover does this)
3. legally licence the code and release a player (anyone?)
4. actually get sorsen to let people have their source(or detailed specs) somehow.
the best thing to do is just start using a codec that already lets people have their source and is on par with the best VP3
I can think of several programs that run under Linux/Unix which will play QuickTime .mov files -- xanim and xmms (plus the QuickTime-xmms plugin) will both play non-sorenson QuickTime files. The problem is, almost nothing worth watching (in the world of things QuickTime) is available in anything other than a Sorenson-encoded version.
.asf, .wmv, and .mpeg files with a variety of options (such as double-size and full-screen), and it will play VideoCDs quite nicely -- I have several movies that were dragged back from China on VCD that look great when run through mplayer. It's a great little video player, but it having the ability to play non-sorenson QuickTime is hardly news.
Sorenson, of course, is owned by Apple, and they are as likely to make it open-source as Microsoft is to release the next Office under the GPL.
Now, mplayer will play
If you want QuickTime under Linux, with the Sorenson codec, your only option is Crossover (which works quite nicely, and has given me many minutes of movie-trailer viewing bliss).
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Linux may be "superior" to Windows in one or more ways -- but what matters is being able to get the job done. And if I can't view a client's QT movie under Linux, Linus doesn't get the job done. And that's why it's important that Linux support QT...
All about me
Just use something BETTER like MPEG.
What a great idea! Why didn't I think of that? Next time I see some movie online that I'd like to watch, I'll just play it in my MPEG player regardless of how it was encoded by someone else!
- fader
Xine does Quicktime to, has done for quite some time. Doesn't do Sorenson either, but they do support win32 codecs, so dropping in the Quicktime dlls isn't impossible futher down the line.
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Aside from Sorenson Quicktime, I have found Linux Multimedia apps quite well-behaved, often better behaved than Windows Media player. One huge thing about the linux versions I use is that they tend to work better at displaying movies acceptably on an underpowered machine, much more intelligent with things like frame dropping and maintaining sync. It seems that Windows developers are becoming less and less concerned with the older hardware, and that is disappointing. It will be quite a while longer before I will be able to afford an upgrade, but linux apps makes my 400 MHz display even high-quality movies acceptably. I may drop a lot of frames, but at least it maintains decent framerates and maintains sync...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Remember that there are two key components to a movie player -- the file format and the video codec. When the MPEG4 codec is finalized, the Quicktime format (and maybe also WiMP) will support it. With a little luck the Sorenson problem will become irrelevant at that point.
There are several reasons the Quicktime format can be more useful than straight MPEG. One of the best (but sadly underused) features is text tracks, which allows subtitles, descriptors for the disabled, etc. Another is the ability to overlay static sprites (for example, TV channel logos) onto the video layer. This kind of stuff can improve image quality and save bandwidth at the same time.
xine.sourceforge.net
But today, everything works:
So while I agree that it's not perfect yet, Linux certainly is no longer in the multimedia-darkage anymore. Sorenson is pretty much the only thing still not working. (unless you are willing to pay a small amount for Crossover, which I did)
BTW, I would recommend aviplay, it's friendlier than mplayer and included in most distributions.
hmmm, I compiled 0.50 some weeks ago with gcc 2.96 (I think the warning is a bit overblown, having to do a --ignore-gcc-whatever *and* having to type 'yeah, gcc 2.96 sucks' or something seems a bit redundant) and it's been working just fine...
While I do not doubt that gcc 2.96 has bugs, in my experience it's not worse than most gcc versions I used during the years, and much better than quite some of them, especially in C++.
I also did a bit of google-ing about this warning in mplayer, and AFAIK some people were a bit angry that 2.96 has been singled out (probably just because it's a RH release) I wonder if the reasons for so prominently warning people about 2.96 are at least in part political...
-- the cake is a lie
One of the very useful (to me) aspects of MPlayer is that it can run console-only. This is very useful on a slow machine with a hardware decoder: I have a P5-133 with a Hollywood+ MPEG2 decoder which can actually playback video, including DVDs. Not bad for a machine that was 'slow' about four or five years ago.
3. legally licence the code and release a player (anyone?)
4. actually get sorsen to let people
These two are actually the same problem: Apple pays Sorenson for an exclusive license to the codec. If it isn't Quicktime, it can't use Sorenson.
Thus, the options are either convince Apple to release Quicktime for *nix (Quicktime for OS X runs way up in the Cocoa/Aqua layers, not down in BSD, so it doesn't count), or convince content producers to use another codec (MPEG4, some day).
The Sorenson codec is owned by Sorenson and Apple pays for it. If you want to get a legal player for a non-Win/Mac platform someone will either have to
reverse engineer the codec(legally questionable and hard)
Try ILLEGAL. You can reverse engineer things protected by copyright, but you cannot reverse engineer patented algorithms.
2. write a wrapper that uses another OSs Code (crossover does this)
Of questionable legality.
3. legally licence the code and release a player (anyone?)
This ignores the real issue. Apple has exclusive licensing to the Sorenson codec. Steve Jobs will NEVER allow a linux player, and this patent has over a decade before it expires. Both Apple and Microsoft want to keep other OSs out of the home/desktop market. Banning streaming media from them is part of the plan. You can expect the next moves from Microsoft will be changing to WMF 2.0 (also patented), and then lease the servers dirt cheap to take over the market from Real and Quicktime.
None of this helps open source users, because the battlefield requires patented protection just to play. And Media Players will only exist for viable desktop market, and linux doesn't matter enough yet. At least Real is backed by AOL, so there is a chance Real will become the de facto standard. But I doubt it. Microsoft can give away WMF servers with the amount of profit they make, and flood the server market with WMF. At that point it is all over.
I do like the fact that this gives Linux yet another avenue for media. This added in with xmovie, gtv, quicktime under wine, xaniam, and now mplayer. I love choices..
Only 'flamers' flame!
I've ignored that warning for a long time and have had no problems. Intersting that it didn't get mentioned, but mplayer plays .asf and divx 3.11 movies too.
When the FAQ writer says "read the documentation" as much as they do then they don't seem to understand that an FAQ is _part_ of the documentation too.
If it is beta software then I think they should be more up front about the beta-ness than simply having a sub 1.0 number and disuade non-coders from trying it before being as insulting as they can be _after_ they suffer through all this.
A direct quote of something else:
"Q: I'd like to compile MPlayer on Minix !
A: Me too."
What is the point of doing that? They could either be less terse or not have such a worthless item. I know it looks like a dumb request but they don't have to respond with dumb answers.
If Sorenson codec is an issue, lets all send mail to Sorenson Labs and ask them to support Linux. At the least, release a DLL for one of the players.
Yes you heard it right. This seems to be good news for Linux users. According to Frank Casanova, the head honcho of Quicktime, Quicktime 6 will de-emphasise Sorenson for MPEG-4. In an interview with Creative:Mac he says
... you'll see our file format of QuickTime is the file format for MPEG-4. As you may remember, [ISO has] selected the QuickTime format as the basis for MPEG-4. And then what we're doing is we're building our own audio and video CODEC, but based on the recipe as published by this standard body, by ISO, for ... video and audio for music and speech. There's a few different CODECs in there. And that's what we're doing going forward. And you can expect to see incredible video quality using these new MPEG-4 CODECs.
... was great for CD-ROM distribution. MPEG-2 ... was targeted at a much higher data rate, much higher quality, and it found its way into areas like DVD playback and for HDTV and for some of the satellite communications where bandwidth is really not constrained. But MPEG-4 is the MPEG for the Internet. It takes lower than MPEG-1 data rates and practically MPEG-2 quality and makes it available for people to stream over the Internet, which is high and to the right, exactly where you want to see this go.
... you can do incredibly good jobs with audio at a much smaller file size and lower data rate and get even better sounding quality than MP3 is providing. I think, over time, we'll see AAC supplant MP3 as the digital audio standard. That's the direction we're headed.
/ ap plequicktimelive0112172.htm
CASANOVA: It's the center of our universe. The Sorenson video CODEC has been an integral part of QuickTime since we had QuickTime 3. Sorenson is exclusive to QuickTime, a proprietary format, that has just produced incredible quality both for download of movie trailers and real-time streaming over the Internet. They've done incredibly well. And we're going to continue working with the Sorenson guys. We're not shutting that off. And people will probably opt to use Sorenson in some cases. But certainly the center of the work we do is going to be around standards.
Everything Apple does--from the Unix bases of OS X, to FireWire being IEEE 1394, to USB to all the various facets of what we do, from AirPort being 802.11--we want to make sure that every piece of our architecture and infrastructure are based on industry standards. QuickTime is no different. Our streaming protocols are RTP/RTSP as defined by the IETS; and now
MPEG-4 continues the lineage of the MPEG family. MPEG-1
And the AAC audio component for music will likely replace MP3 as the default and brand new audio standard on the Web because I'll tell you what,
Earlier [last] week, with Real Networks announcing their support for MPEG-4, we found that to be a sudden and abrupt change in direction for them, but nonetheless a welcome one. We're really happy here at Apple, and as members of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance--the ISMA--we're really happy that Real had decided to make this change in course. Real is a big company, at least from an Internet media streaming perspective, and their stamp of approval on MPEG-4 gives the whole space more momentum.
The rest of the interview can be found here...
http://www.creativemac.com/2001/12_dec/features
avifile uses some wine source to utilize win32 dll's to play stuff like windows media video. what prevents them from adding the windows dll for sorenson to it?
i've unfortunately been too lazy to fire off an e-mail and ask them how difficult it would be to add it to the project, else i'd think of doing it myself (unfortunately, i'm not a kung foo master yet ... in fact, i'm almost inept as a programmer ... but i'll whine about that later).
speaking of which, has anybody else thought of this as a possible solution?
Brian Voils
"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."
mplayer -vo x11 test.mpg
You may still have problems with audio, depending on your desktop environment. I don't know if esd poses any problems, but with KDE I have do run
mplayer -vo x11 -ao sdl test.mpg
If you don't have sdl and you have problems, you could always just chuck the audio with
mplayer -vo x11 -ao null test.mpg
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Or, even better, have a widely used, standardized plugin format that various players can use. I doubt that Apple will allow a Sorenson codec for Linux even then, though.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Then, why exactly is QSS (QuickTime Streaming Server) free? It also runs in Darwin, which is and Open Source OS.
It is all about market control and blocking alternatives other than Windows and MacOS. The server even exists for linux. Just no player.
This is not about the amount of effort it would take to port the Sorenson codec to linux. Quicktime players already exist, and their authors are willing to code it at no cost to Apple.
Apple, however, will not allow this to occur. Patented codecs like WMF 2.0 and the Sorenson codec are not ALLOWED in linux simply because that is one more thing keeping Unices from becoming viable desktop alternatives of the future. And these streaming media patents have a LONG LONG time to go before they expire.
Real, however, actually provides support for other OSs (by supporting a player coded by the linux community).
How can anyone have a web standard that is not open and provided with cross-platform support ? These moves by Apple and Microsoft have two aims - to control the streaming server market and to block free operating systems from the desktop market. Period.
If it were patented, we could just look up the specs eh?
There should certainly be enough there to get started. And, in countries that do not support algorithm patents, this would be legal.
It is non-trivial to reverse engineer such a codec, though. It would be a massive effort.
You are a strange man if you WANT Real and their bloated spyware to win the war.
I'd really liked an unencumbered codec to win.
Barring that (and that seems unlikely), I'd like a codec supported cross-platforms to win.
And if that fails, the market has failed me. I do not use Windows or MacOS, and anything else will simply not be seen by me.
Xine can now do DivX, OpenDivX, DVD, MPEG 1/2, Windows Media Video 8 and 8, and most of the formats MPlayer can. So can Avifile. They're open source, Mplayer isn't - read their documentation sometime, specifically the part on packaging. And no, not just the codecs, but the project itself.
Non-Sorenson Quicktime in only useful for people making movies under Linux.
Many people put in a bloody large amount of time and effort into getting newcomers to the platform. Telling someone they're an idiot because they don't know how ldconfig works undoes that hard work and pisses me off. Its possible to answer newbiew questions withotu being a fuckwit, but the mplayer team would rather serve their own egos. Especially if mplayer was packaged like most Linux programs (the mplayer team forbid this) the postinstaller would do that anyway.
Ogle, Xine and Avifile are also more well designed, with most options avaliable via the GUI and command line switches rather than compile time options.
The MPlayer team have also yet to respond to Bero's response re: their GCC 2.96 claims, leaving something on their web page which has seemingly been proven to be technically false.
Furthermore, telling me in captial letters that MY SYSTEM IS TO SLOW TO PLAY THIS MOVIE when I'm fairly sure a 900 Mhz Athlon with 640MB of RAM is capable of playing a VGA res DivX is worth a laugh or two.
When there's a billion better players out there which don't go out of their way to be rude to people and Open Source licensing, why use Mplayer?
There are a few reasons behind that. Firstly, MPlayer has many options with regard to what kind of output it should use. These are bese selected during compilation.
GFair enough, but that's an architecture problem that the team should hopefully fix soon.
Secondly, to be really useful, MPlayer requires several dlls, and codecs. These codecs either come from the windows dlls, or from closed source projects like the DivX(tm) MPEG-4 Codec.
So? Many (read most) Linux players do this: Avifile, Xine, etc. They can still be packaged - stick freshrpms.net in your sources.list on your redhat box and APT away. They just separate the DLLs from the software if necessary.
Unlike the Open Source players, though, Mplayer uses non Open Source code in its actual binaries apparently. So yeah, ignore the web page claiming its open source and read this Mplayer therefore does not meet the Open Source Definition or the Free Software Freedoms list and shouldn't bother claiming to be Open Source.
International Intellectual Property (IIP) issues might arise when Hungary gets around to applying to join the European Union (or NATO). But the EU politicians haven't AFAIK been quite as corrupt as US congress-critters about pandering to Big Music and Hollywood, so there's some hope that they'll maintain First Sale and (noncommercial) Fair Use types of consumer media rights. The EU is fairly tough about protecting consumers' privacy rights, so one can hope the RIAA/MPAA won't prevail there. (Vivendi owning Universal is a worry, but they're in France and can't buy laws one hopes.)
In any case, it won't matter. The horse is out of the barn already. The RIAA/MPAA can close the barn door (in the US, maybe), but they won't ever catch the horse again. To paraphrase someone's famous quote about the Internet, open source software interprets authoritarian oppression as damage... and routes around it.
It'll be a cold day in hell before AAC usurps MP3.
I subscribed to the mailing list for a while, and the reason it got singled out is because every couple of days someone would complain that mplayer didn't compile. And the reason for that? Because they were using gcc 2.96.
Who reads warnings from 'configure'? That's right, not many people at all. So having the luser type in a statement that they know what they are doing is far better than letting them "click-thru" something you can be sure they didn't read.