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Codeweavers' CrossOver Plugin Reviewed
Grok writes: "CodeWeavers' CrossOver Plugin allows Linux users to use software and browser plugins that where once only avaliable on Windows. Version 1.0 was released in late August 2001 to much media furvor, while the release of version 1.1 arrived without much fanfare. Despite the lack of attention by the news media, the new version of CrossOver is a more exciting release than the orginal. The reason? Microsoft Media Player Support. Finally, every major plugin on the internet, along with several obscure ones, are now supported under Linux. (Full Story)"
This would be an ideal legal challenge for the FSF to undertake. Interoperability is something they've been convicted on; using their monopoly to illegally prevent and stifle competition by decreasing the competitions ability to provide interoperability. This would actually be a relatively simple legal battle, seeing as many of the facts of the case have already been established in the federal antitrust case. On top of this, another lawsuit filed by MS to stifle the competition would simply raise the eyebrows of current states who are making huge compromises with the settlement.
The only complication I can see here is the absence of Digital Rights Management, probably not present in the plugin. Not that this is a big deal, but it might mean something to Microsoft. And I agree, Real sucks fatty.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Forget WMA's - I don't see widespread take up of these anywhere. However, WMV is a big thing. The quality of those compared to the download size is very high.
I have a couple of videos on my site (http://www.eruvia.org) in MPG format to make sure everyone can see them. I'd rather use WMV however, because my testing showed that the quality/file size trade-off was better. I'd be pleased to see these under Linux.
Cheers,
Ian
The crossover plugin (and the WINE installation that you get with it) is great. I bought it as a company expense so that I could view documents in proprietary Microsoft formats that I need to do for my job - and I don't see why Microsoft should be rewarded for polluting the world with proprietary formats. I'd rather money went towards the development of WINE.
But what worries me is that now I can view all those whizzy Sorensen encoded QuickTime movies without worrying about it, I am actually reinforcing the view that these formats are good - by increasing the download figures for them.
I guess I really should compose some standard email to send to sites that publish stuff in proprietary formats - but it's often difficult to even find an address to send stuff too, and when you do you don't usually get any kind of response.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
I have used CrossOver since v 1.0 and it is really good. First of all, the installation is very simple and it let's you download the latest codecs of say QuickTime (that's what I mainly use it for) so you always get the latest versions installed. It nicely installs the browser plugins and let's you enable them for individual browsers on your system.
It also creates nice Gnome/KDE shortcuts to launch the QuickTime player.
One could use normal Wine to watch QuickTime in the player, but I gladly pay the extra $20 to get the browser plugin.
Conclusion, very nice product worth paying for. But wouldn't it be even nicer if we could play Quicktime/Windows Media movies with a native library instead?
Ciryon
KDE 3.1 is going to support animated SVG.
However that doesn't help you now. I noticed that Konqueror didn't pick up my SVG plugin (the Adobe beta plugin, which you can download from their "older versions" link) which works fine in Mozilla 0.9.9. I tried all sorts of ways of copying it around different places but just couldn't get it to work. I suspect that Konqueror expects plugins to be in the old Netscape format, rather than the newer Mozilla plugin format - so I think you need to ask the KDE people to look into supporting Mozilla plugins too.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
WINE isn't an IBM product. It isn't being sold at twice the cost of the MS product (rather the opposite, in fact). OS/2's problem wasn't that Windows ran Windows programs better (it didn't) it was that IBM sold it at retail for $250 when Win+DOS was less than $100. IBM's sales force couldn't have sold space heaters in Point Barrow Alaska. IBM killed OS/2. MS just let them.
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I've been using the Crossover plugin for about three months now, and it never ceases to amaze me quite how well it works.
One of the things that was not mentioned in the review was that the 1.1 version of the plugin also officially supports Chime - a plugin for viewing proteins and molecular structures - perfectly. (version 1.0 could run chime after a bit of hacking, but did occasionally crash).
For people working in Bio/Cheminformatics, this is a genuine boon, as the plugin traditionally only supports Windows and Mac. All of a sudden, you don't need to use citrix (or whatever!) to view molecules in mozilla on your linux box! It's the best $25 I've spent in a long time. 8)
Read my online journal: http://chris.carline.org
But somebody probably could do this with Mac-On-Linux (MOL)--it's loosely the same idea as WINE, it lets you run a Mac OS in a window under Linux for PPC. It's very fast since it's not emulating the CPU.
anyway, having this type of capability for linux on all hardware platforms is important for linux world domination. so get busy.