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Notes On The Future of Video on Linux
Dina's Dream points out two interesting articles currently running on LinuxPower, and linked from Gnotices (GNOME news site) as well. "The first article is a really good
summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including
GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is
a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart."
My pvr production is running slick as can be, now that I have ditched all the capture card madness (WinTV, Buz, etc). All I need now is a $30 firewire card and my trusty Canopus ADVC-100 and I capture full frame 720x480 video in better than DVD quality. If you are considering doing a lot of capture/encoding of anything, I highly recommend this setup. dvgrab running under linux seems to be very stable and the captured video is virtually identical to the source.
There is one group working on a complete multimedia network architecture. More information can be found unter www.networkmultimedia.org.
Quote from the web-page:
"The goal of this project is to design and implement a network-integrated multimedia infrastructure for Linux as well as other operating systems. Since many low-level parts of such a system already exist (like en-/decoders, de-/compression, multimedia networking APIs, CORBA, and others), our primary goal is the development of an architecture, which integrates these usually isolated modules. This unified architecture will offer a simple and easy to use interface for applications to integrate multimedia functionality. Therefore, it can be used as enabling technology for traditional multimedia applications, but also for ubiquitous computing and mobile computing.The result of our work will be made available as OpenSource."
- Jarman
I read the article on video for linux, and what the author basically describes is SDL. I think that he means it to be a layer under what SDL is, so it wouldn't be portable, but the functionality is basically SDL.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
DivX is waste of energy and programmer time. Its so patent trapped that one yawn from the movie industry to the patent holders and it'll be gone except in very limited form
Something like VP3.2 holds more promise (and hey I got the lib to actually -compile- on a non windows/mac box two days ago)
Now combine VP3.2 video with Ogg audio and you have a credible media format. Add xhtml navigation and you have something really cool
You should check out the PLF distro (not PLD).
It contains non-free rpms for mandrake, installable with urpmi/rpmdrake.
Only mplayer is not available in binary rpm, just source.rpm.
PLF is actually built on a current cooker distro (cooker-mandrake-devel), but there is someone recompiling them against mdk 8.1.
Just try them.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Yes, DivX isn't easy under Linux, but this is because it's a windoze format. It was written under windoze for windoze, supposedly using hacked microsoft code.
./configure make make install at least two packages, but the resulting player is worth it. In addition to the many formats supported, you get a player that is very well optimized for your cpu and graphics card (well, only Matrox cards are really well done right now, but ATI and Nvidia support are coming).
DivX for Linux is still in the development stage. There are no mature players, and until there are, it will not be super simple to install.
That being said, you should take a look at mplayer (see freshmeat.net). Mplayer has step by step instructions on how to compile and install avifile, libdvdread and other tools that come together to make a really great player. Yes, you do have to
Give it a try, it works.
Video on linux has always been one of my favorite things.
The biggest advance in v4l was essentially the XFree86 4.x release since it encorporated an Xvideo extension allowing for really nice video play back in Linux.
There are a couple cards that are extremely well supported. I personally use an ATI AIW and the MPEG playback in incredible. In fact, I prefer MPEGs in Linux verses Windows simply because I think Linux does a better job at using the RGB conversion stuff at the hardware level than Windows does.
Of course, the biggest foe to video in Linux has been the fact that many of the best accelerations (iDCT) are simply not supported because card makers fear releases 'techinical secrets.'
Another problem is the split in video display APIs. Prior to the Xv extension being released, the Linux kernel had a video4linux API. The second version of that API is incredible as it has so many features that would allow for truely pluggable components.
Unfortunately, all X stuff is implemented in user space so cards that have integrated display and video stuff end up supporting everything in user space and then providing a loopback mechanism to work with the kernel API. It's a little messy but hopefully everything will get worked out as things progress.
Otherwise, hats off to all the hard work of the gatos project, the v4l2 project, and linuxvideo. If you haven't tried all the really cool stuff available for video on linux, you really should.
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urpmi (in Mandrake) already does exactly what you request from rpm. It resolves all the dependencies and will either download the RPMS from an online source or ask you to insert your installation CDs. Hopefully Redhat will snarf it into their next distro. (That would actually be quite appropriate given how much Mandrake has snarfed from RedHat. Both distros would benefit from some cross-pollenation.)
Or you could just get apt-get and let it sort out the dependencies in your rpms for you automatically. The Freshrpms apt archive (for Red Hat 7.2) has packages for
And all you need to install them is type apt-get installl (whatever) to fetch the rpms, whatever dependencies they need to install, and install the packages.
IIRC, Win2k and recent installation generators partially avoid the DLL hell problem by encouraging applications to install their own DLLs in their own separate installation directory. This negates many of the advantages of DLLs.
DLL hell has been a genuine problem for a considerable time (>2 years), even if you haven't seen it in Win2k in the past 2 years. Try setting up a Win95 machine and install some old software if you are feeling masochistic!