Windows Media Player in Linux

mr lee writes "Today CodeWeavers released CrossOver plugin 1.1 which now supports Windows Media Player 6.4 under Linux. As much I would not like to see or support sites that use Windows Media shite, its still really nice to have this option. Not too mention kick ass QuickTime playing." Update: 02/27 18:30 GMT by H : I've actually been using this - it's done really really well. I'm planning on doing a fuller review soon, but it's very well done.

Comments

No native version?

[Ed Avis]

IIRC Windows Media Player was the one program where Microsoft released a native Linux version. It didn't last long though.

Re:No native version?

[HMC CS Major]

It's modded (+3, funny) as I type, but it really is true ...

See http://www.vnunet.com/News/105831 and http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981009S 0021 for details.

Re:No native version?

[Mike Hicks]

Yeah, back when it was known as the NetShow player (this was back in 1997 or 1998). It was released shortly after Microsoft acquired another company that had made a cross-platform player. MS had said that they would release another version, but it never happened.

I used it a few times, mostly to play the .asf video of Win98 crashing for Bill Gates at a computer conference..

what about Mplayer

[steve.m]

which supports Win32 Codecs including Quicktime MOV, etc. see Here.

Re:what about Mplayer

[HeUnique]

1. It still doesn't fully supports ASX files (yes, even with the latest CVS - I tried one from yesterday).

2. It doesn't provide you with any embedding to your browser. Go ahead and hack it to make mplayer GUI appear inside Mozilla/Konqueror on most of the sites (now.com, yahoo.com, news.com) - good luck!

Re:what about Mplayer

[kraf]

From the mplayerhq.hu website:
(http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/formats.ht ml#2.1.1.4 )

"Codecs: any codecs allowed, both CBR and VBR. Note: most new mov files use Sorenson video and QDesign Music audio. These formats are completely secret, and only Apple's quicktime player is able to play these files (on win/mac only)."

So it basically doesn't support MOV except some old stuff.

Re:what about Mplayer

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

Mplayer is sweet, I use it as my only (video) player on my FreeBSD box.

However, while it does support Quicktime, almost all of the newly released QT movies are compressed with Sorenson (sp?) codec, which is closed source, and Apple licenses it from another company. Therefore, unless Apple, and Sorenson (sp?) both give permission (read: unlikely), you won't find a legal open-source player. Apple (and others) can port the app to different platforms, and others still can make a shell for the application (read: what Codeweavers did), but you still don't get the benifits of open-source programmers optimizing the heck out of the program.

Re:what about Mplayer

[Nailer]

which supports Win32 Codecs including Quicktime MOV, etc. see Here [mplayerhq.hu].

Comparing the two:

• MPlayer doesn't work within browsers.
  
• Neither does it, to my knowledge, using 6.0, play Sorenson Quicktime, which constitutes 99% of Quicktime on the web
  
• MPlayer does not, and according to its developers, will not ever play audio files
  
• Crossover has a nicer plugin config app and documentation that's more pleasant to its users.
  
• Crossovr does many other things MPlayer doesn't - eg, QuicktimeVR, Ipix, Shockwave, etc.
  
• Neither product is Open Source, as neither satisfies condition 2 of the Open Source Definition, despite the mplayer folk telling people it is. I get the same level of freedom with both apps, and the license fee for Crossover is small. At least with Codeweavers, licensing cash goes towards Alexandre Julliard and the other founders of the Wine project who give a lot back to the Open Source community.
  

Too late

[jandrese]

Mplayer already does pretty much everything Windows Media Player can do, and it's native to Linux. The Quicktime support mentioned in the writeup is a red herring, Windows Media Player (IIRC) still does not support Sorenson Quicktimes, making it no better than xanim at playing modern .mov files.

Re:Too late

[Dixie_Flatline]

In fact, I find it does things BETTER. I've actually found myself booting into Linux to watch movies on occasion. I've got a powerbook, so that takes care of my Quicktime needs.

Use mplayer. It's at version 0.60, and it's a pretty superior product.

Hey

[Starship Trooper]

Not to scare you guys (no web site, just a mailing list?), but - did any of you ask Microsoft about this before you wrote it?

I'm not implying that you did anything wrong, but in today's insane world, the DMCA can pretty much be wielded like a baseball bat. People like CNN who use WMP to distribute their advertisements before their content in a streaming manner expect their ads to be preserved. If you've added an extra functionality in here, or any method whatsoever to bypass ads, save streaming video, or otherwise do anything but sit in your chair and watch what they send you, you might get hit by the eager-beaver Microsoft Legal Team. In fact, just making this functionality user modifiable (i.e., open source) might be enough for you to become a "circumvention device".

Care to comment?

Few comments on crossover 1.1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, you might want to read this:

The crossover plugin will let you play Windows media player files, but emedding inside the browser is very problematic. Why? simple - The Windows Media player when works with Netscape - uses Netscape's Java (1.1.x) to communicate with the player and to embedd the window.

What does this means to you? it means that you can watch WMP embedded in your browser - if you're using the old Netscape - Version 4.x - not Konqureror, not Mozilla (any build).

It's not CodeWeaver's fault - it's the way MS did it - the exact thing will happend on Windows. The guys from CodeWeavers will look into it and probably try to hack something..

Other features that are not mentioned - you can now use Trillian, Real Player 8 (the much better Windows version, not the crappy Linux version), you can install fonts directly from MS web site, and the speed seems to be imrpvoed.

Lots of other plugins has been added to the crossover, and IMHO it's worth the $19.95 price (there is a free upgrade to previous owners), and of course - all the hacks that was done to wine - are rolling back to the main tree - so your money helps open source...

I'm sure that people here will write that "don't buy it since it support non standard audio/video format" - to them I'm saying that when 90% of the people have those players - webmasters won't give a crap about others...

Cheers,
Mesh Mesh

Re:Few comments on crossover 1.1.0

[Junta]

To get an idea of the convoluted navigation:
First near bottom of screen clcik on "Previous Player Versions"
Then the tiny "Realplayer 8 Basi is our free player" link. Then select UNIX to get new form, then you must select a Linux 2.x version to get the right screen next (rpm or tar, doesn't matter). Then ignore the download links and scroll down below item number 5.. There you are....
To shortcut to the Unix form, here is url:
http://proforma.real.com/real/player/unix/un ix.htm l

CrossOver is worth every penny

[tempest303]

I bought CrossOver back in November, and I LOVE it. As a previous poster talked about, I don't enjoy "legitimizing" uber-proprietary formats like Sorensen Quicktime or Windows Media, but sometimes one has no choice. This is where CrossOver comes in, and it does its job admirably. The install and setup are simple, and best of all, it JUST WORKS, just as all payware ought to. If all commercial/payware software was as well made and as well supported as Crossover, Free software wouldn't have nearly the appeal that it does right now, IMHO...

Anyway, if you're running Linux and you've ever missed not being able to watch movie trailers, certain pr0n stuff, etc, don't suffer any longer! Plunk down the $20, it's worth it! You get great software AND you're supporting the single largest (to my knowledge) contributor to the WINE project. (Not to mention helping put some food on the table for some great geeks - I live near St Paul so I got a free tour of their office; they're cool people. :)

Re:CrossOver is worth every penny

[unformed]

Anyway, if you're running Linux and you've ever missed not being able to watch movie trailers, certain pr0n stuff, etc, don't suffer any longer! Plunk down the $20, it's worth it!

Why do that when I shift over about 4 feet to my rommates puter. That way not only do I save 20 bucks, but I make his keyboard sticky isntead of mine.

;)

Re:CrossOver is worth every penny

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

I'm completely pleased with my copy of CrossOver as well. The QuickTime support (which I bought it for) is excellent. When I eventually ran into a PowerPoint presentation I needed to look at, I was happy to discover that CrossOver's support for the Microsoft PowerPoint View was quite solid. Their support is prompt, accurate, and friendly. For $20 I am a very satisfied customer.

Reading For Comprehension 101.

[Doktor Memory]

[...] but Quicktime under windows is [...]

That's all well and good, but Mr. Lee wasn't talking about Quicktime under Windows. He said, and I quote:

As much I would not like to see or support sites that use Windows Media shite, its still really nice to have this option. Not too mention kick ass QuickTime playing."

He is clearly referring to using the Crossover Plugin to play Quicktime under Linux, which it indeed does a "kick-ass" job of doing.

You might want to have that jerking knee attended to by a physician.

Don't support Windows Media.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

While it's great that Codeweavers has managed to get enough of WINE working to support Windows Media Player, it's still a very bad idea for us to use it. Here's why.

Every time you click on a Windows Media file, you are sending a message to the site operator which basically says "I support Microsoft's efforts to monopolize digital media." You're voting with your mouse.

Right now, in most places we still have a choice of formats: Windows Media, Real, streaming MP3, whatever. If everyone just mindlessly chooses the Windows Media formats without a second thought, site operators are going to look at their logs and say "well, nobody is using the Real/MP3/whatever formats, so let's just start webcasting exclusively in Windows Media format." Do you want that to happen? I sure don't. We cannot afford to let Microsoft monopolize this market. Think of the ramifications of Microsoft having a 100 percent lock on digital content. Digital Rights Management? Easy... just put it in Windows Media. Region lockouts? Put it in Windows Media. Want to work around those problems? Sorry, you can't, because digital media is Windows Media and you don't have any other choice!

Let's not forget that even though Windows Media Player may now run on Linux, you'll never see a Linux distribution that includes it, because the Crossover Plugin is not free, and Microsoft's licenses prevent WMP from appearing on Linux CD's.

Great technology, bad way to use it. As Linux users we must keep on clicking on those non-Microsoft formats, and politely asking site operators to maintain or add media in non-Microsoft formats. Let's not succumb to the urge to satisfy short-term viewing/listening needs at the expense of sacrificing long-term interoperability.

Re:thank god

[Archie Steel]

Lack of Multimedia? Netscape crashing every 10 minutes? When was the last time you tried Linux? You should give it another go, you might be surprised...as it is, the only multimedia format I couldn't play on my Linux box were .wma and .asf (I've had Crossover for Quicktime for a while, now - works beautifully). As for Netscape crashing, I ran Netscape 6.1 for four months and maybe the application unexpectedly quit two or three times (and it was on all the time...)

No, the only thing Linux lacks right now as far as multimedia goes is a strong competitor to Adobe Illustrator and a non-linear video editing program (like Avid, or even Premiere). The rest is all there, son.

There's something wrong here

[rjamestaylor]

Here's a story, basing Microsoft products as "shite", about using said Microsoft product in Linux and praises Apple's just-as-proprietary media format. /*Head spins*/

So, am I to understand that MS sucks so very bad that we need to run out, install a different MS-free OS and then get a utility to run pieces of MS software to have a decent computing experience yet give no "thank you" to MS for making a product that enables us to have that enjoyable computing experience?

This reminds me of street beggars spitting on people who give them money for being capitalist pigs. Sheesh.

Re:[OT] Re:No native version?

[Edgewize]

Um, no, it wasn't fake. The 'slide in' effect came from the video source. If you've ever changed resolutions on an older video projector, you'd see that the horizontal alignment starts way off and then slides to the center.

Legality?

[Xunker]

The reason it's only WiMP 6.4 and not 7 or 8 is not a technical reason, but a legal one.

I can't remember where I read it (it is on the Codeweavers site, though), that the reason WiMP wasn't supported from the get-go was that the license says something about how it can only be installed in the Windows platform, and Crossover/Wine kinda doesn't qualify.

Ah, yes, here is the snippet from the support forums (Tue, 28 Aug 2001):

We've put some energy into WMP 7.1, but if you look at the license for WMP, there is a potential barrier. At this point, it would appear (based on the MS license) that the only legal way we could support WMP is if it were already installed on an existing MS partition.
However, IANAL, and we're still looking into this.

..but I'm not going to complain or anything, of course! Now the only thing I need my MacOS and Windows boxed (any work, anyway) for is, well, games!

Re:Codecs

[HeUnique]

So far - from my tests - it played every movie that Windows Media player can play in standard windows - and yes, the player downloads the codec from microsoft site and installs it..

Likely Not Legal

[youngsd]

I took a quick look at the EULA in my Windows Media directory. This snippet seems important:

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALIDLY LICENSED COPY OF ANY VERSION OR EDITION OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MILLENUM EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000 OPERATING SYSTEM OR ANY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THOSE OPERATING SYSTEMS (EACH AN "OS PRODUCT"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.

Earlier in the EULA, Windows Media Player is described as an"OS Component". So, it looks like any use of Windows Media Player on a non-Windows operating system is probably not permitted. If it were, you can be sure MS would fix that in the next version of the EULA.

It will be interesting to see whether MS tries to do anything to CodeWeavers on this front.

-Steve

Re:Likely Not Legal

[EllF]

Actually, if you re-read the snippet you quoted, it indicates that legal use is granted if you "have a validly licensed copy" of at least Win98 or better. In my case, the last operating system I purchased from Microsoft was Windows 98SE; thus, I meet the EULA requirements for using Windows Media Player on another operating system.

Posession of the license is key, not having an installed copy of Windows.

Re:Likely Not Legal

[fobbman]

The EULA snippet from above appears in WMPlayer versions 7 onward. This is why they went with 6.4, as this requirement does not show up in 6.4's EULA.

CodeWeaver's is, however, looking for a way around this for those of us who have Windows installed on another partition.

Re:Likely Not Legal

[jafuser]

You don't really need a WMP >6.4 anyway, as it plays all codecs just as well as 7. Actually better, since it's a bit more efficient than the bloatware that is WMP7+.

Re:Likely Not Legal

[InodoroPereyra]

Yes, they are aware of that. There is a post in one of their mailing lists about this, from October 2001. Jeremy White mainly says

As to Windows Media Player, we've really deemphasized
our focus on it, entirely because the license
agreement for WMP is fairly draconian.

However, Wine is continually improving, and I'm hoping
that Wine will support WMP in the future for those
that have a valid WMP license.

Cheers,

Jeremy

I really wonder what happened after that, did they find a way around the license?. Anyway, long life to the great wine community ...

Cheers,
Don Inodoro

What's the point?

[Junta]

Already we have the library avifile for managing nearly any WMP format, as well as xine and mplayer. Quicktime was important because no one has gotten Sorenson to work in any form under linux. Windows Media not only plays using avifile and such, but keeps the wine stuff at the lowest level possible, even replacing win32 codecs with native ones when possible (i.e. vorbis, mp3, divx, etc...). This means for one thing performance is tolerable. For another, at the higher levels you are guaranteed to do more sophisticated things with the output. Foremost of these is making use of hardware overlay surfaces in different color formats (YUV overlays) providing hardware colorspace conversion and smooth scaling, improving both quality and performance. Using WMP through wine means that not only is much more of the code done in inefficient win32-in-linux mode, it means there is no capacity for native codecs and that all colorspace conversion, scaling, and filtering must be done in software, prohibitively slow.

Re:great! (now i want to (get rid of) my real1 pla

[Junta]

Of course, to play realmedia files maybe you should try realplayer? Just a thought... Thought the site is horrible to navigate, you can find it. Basically, you have to request the older version, then select unix, then poke around enough and you can even find a RealOne beta for linux, which supports the XVideo extension for hardware scaling and colorspace conversion.

For Windows Media, try avifile, PythonTheater, xine, or mplayer. Though it is good they are working towards this stuff, Windows Media Player through wine is inelegant, since the overhead imposed by wine and the lack of XVideo support makes media playback bad. Only reason to tolerate QuickTime through wine is because there is no other option for Sorenson encoded media...

Re:Way to go

[Gleef]

Sinjun trolls:

Way to go there buddy. Kick them for using the most widely supported media format out there. How dare they ensure that the largest number of people can view their stuff!?

Um, the MPEG-2 Video Codec works in Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quicktime Viewer, DVD Players, VCD Players, and dozens of Free Software programs on pretty much any platform with decent processor speed and video specifications. It produces good quality video in a reasonable file size as well, and lets the producer decide just how much to compress the video. By any sane measure, it is the "most widely supported [video] media format out there".

Calling a Windows-only media format that just one program can view "the most widely supported" is either naively ill-informed or a deliberate lie.

There's a bigger problem.

[Verteiron]

Actually, my bigger concern here would this:

From the Windows Media Player EULA:

NOTE: If you do not have a validly licensed copy of any version or edition of Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millenum Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system or any Microsoft operating system that is a successor to any of those operating systems (each an "os product"), you are not authorized to install, copy or otherwise use the os components and you have no rights under this supplemental EULA.

Oops.

What else can MP v6.4 handle?

[antdude]

I have MPlayer, Xine, and Oogle. I can play DivX4, MPEG, etc. What else am I missing that Media Player v6.4 can handle? Is it only WMV and WMA? If so, then I thought it was only supported in 7.x+?

Thank you in advance.

Re:HOW ABOUT

[fferreres]

'Free' software only really appeals to those people that refuse to pay for software outright... and would end up pirating pay software anyway.

How about:

'Free' software only really appeals to those people that refuse to pirate...

I've "discovered" the fact that i can't switch many people to Linux because they better like pirating Windows stuff. The very second things become unpirateable, they'll start bitching like babies and will run to Linux OR pay for cheap alternatives to the defacto standards of today.

You can use Wine to do this

[HomerG]

Wine has been able to run Media Player 6.4 for some time now. I wrote a small script to launch it some time ago, called mplayer2, so as not to be confused with the Linux Mplayer.

#!/bin/sh
cd "/mnt/windows/Program Files/Windows Media Player"
wine --managed --debugmsg -all mplayer2.exe $1

Then set the mime type in Navigator/Mozilla/Galeon/Konqueror like this:

MIMEType: video/x-ms-asf
Application: /bin/mplayer2 "%u"

The above is for Navigator, but you get the idea. I of course made the script executable and as you can see moved it to the /bin directory.

It's not going to embed it in your browser and most of the commercial sites that offer trailers require the newest player. But it will work as well as the Codeweavers plugin if the need should arise, without the cost.

Disclaimer: I have purchased the Crossover plugin and am very happy with it.

Browser embedding

[dmaxwell]

Plugger 4.0 worked well for me with an MPlayer/Galeon combo. I'll give out a Plugger hint you won't find on the Plugger site. At on my Debian machine it needed a little help to register it's MIME types with Mozilla. Put a copy of the pluggerrc file in the .mozilla directory in your $HOME. Any time you edit the pluggerrc (the one in your $HOME/.mozilla) to add another MIME type, delete the appreg file in the same directory. This forces Mozilla/Galeon to reparse the pluggerc file.

Plugger recently updated to 4.0, be sure you're using that version. Plugger can be had from:

http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger.html

BTW. I was able to compile it under Debian PowerPC and it worked fine there.

Re:My girlfriend can finally use linux

[autechre]

Word and Excel run using Wine (not sure about Publisher...never really heard of it). OpenOffice is also a suitable replacement for those programs in almost every case (hasn't failed on me for any Word or Excel documents, and sometimes opens documents better than the "real" Office!)

Windows Media Server on Linux

[sbombay]

When it comes to the Windows Media market, Microsoft is more willing to support other operating systems. Real Networks is the monoploy player in the streaming market and Microsoft will do anything to make Windows Media win this market, including supporting Linux.

Last year a company called Starbak released a streaming server on Linux that supports Window Media Technology (WMT). They built the server from scratch without using any Microsoft code. They initiated OEM discussions with several companies. These large companies got nervous about a reverse engineered server and wanted Starbak to get a license from Microsoft. Suprisingly, Microsoft didn't object and licensed the technology to Starbak. Starbak lists Microsoft as a partner and they talk about Microsoft licensing WMT to Starbak.

From the Starbak

"STARBAK has a Windows Media Technology (WMT) server license to support the delivery of WMT to the desktop over the company's proprietary embedded operating system (OS) platform. This WMT licensing event represented a first for the streaming media industry"

The proprietary embedded OS is actually Linux.

Microsoft was even willing to license the source code to other companies to port WMT to other OSes. I don't think anyone has taken them up on their offer.

Everyone: But this please!

[Dwonis]

Some Slashdotters don't seem to understand the significance of this.

What's the #1 reason why people still use Windows, even though they hate its broken crappiness? Alternatives like Linux and BSD lack backward-compatibility with Windows.

What does does the CrossOver plugin offer? Partial, but significant, backward-compatibility with Windows. Net result: more people use Linux, so more Linux-native software is developed, Microsoft is marginalized, and everybody wins.

I just bought the downloadable version of the plugin, you really should, too.