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."

Comments

DivX ;-)

[Apreche]

Yeah, there are lots of DivX players for linux. I've seen them everywhere. But how come none of them seem to work with Mandrake? I tried everything. The #1 problem with linux is no longer hardware support, since Mandrake supports all the hardware in my computer, even my printer, automatically.

The #1 problem is ease of software installation and configuration. Sure rpms are great, until you get some that depend on something else. Which depends on somethign else, which dependson the rpm you were trying to install in the first place. Not to mention when you try to install something from source, and it wont compile. I don't have the time or the patience to figure out what is wrong with someone else's code.

I know how to code yes. But when I donwload a DivX player and it fails to make, make install. I have no clue how to fix it. That's why I'm downloading a DivX player, and not writing my own. So far Tribes 2 server, and Netscape/Mozilla are the only linux programs that I've seen (there are probably more) that have windows style installations. This means it can be done. Do it more often. Like all the time. Then maybe I wont have to reboot my computer to watch movies.