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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)"
Is there much point, I think the only files I can't play with Xine+plenty o' plugins are wma's - and do I really want to be able to?
yeah I just *LOVE* it when asf files open web pages while I'm watching porn
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Anyone tried QuickTime plug-in support with Mozilla? This review mostly focuses on Real and WMP ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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.
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>
Hey, I've been ranting about lack of Authorware support on a Linux desktop for years now. Stokin'. This is really a big deal because all sorts of multimedia educational apps are made with Authorware and only work on Mac and Windows. Getting Windows out of the schools seems like a primary (get it) starting point.
Of course it's not the K runtime I've been asking the good people at Macromedia to compile, but it's better than nothing which was what the options were before.
I love this idea.
The use of free software such as Windows Media Player and such makes it funny because what is Microsoft's defense?
Do they say to use their free Windows software such as WMP you need Windows? I've been trying to make this point since the trial started. The OS is the bundleware stupid! It's that tax you pay to stay under the MS umbrella of products.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Gates getting up and preaching about how now "The Enemy is using our own weapons against us" or some other Operation-Enduring-Monopoly-esque response to something like this.
Heh... how are they going to respond to this? I'm willing to bet something like a "Department of Obfuscation" to make their apps more Windows-reliant to counter the GPL's general desire of universal compatability. Ministry of Truth, anyone?
Oh well. The more Orwellian that M$ becomes, the more I can call up my mother and say "See? I told you so!"
Karma: Non-Heinous
Propitery? Equilivent? Avaliable? Furvor? Commercal? Instalation? Execlent? Usefull? Acurratly? Unnoticiable? Noticable? Embeded? Prefrences? Imagianable? Opiton?
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
Has anyone successfully got SVG (scalable vector graphics) working in Konqueror? I'm not just talking about static images, but fully ECMA-scriptable ones, like you get in Mozilla or Internet Explorer with Adobe's plug-in. How easy would it be to get the Adobe plug-in to work in Konqueror using something like CrossOver? I'm surprised at the apparent lack fo support for an open graphics standard in the open source world.
Having support for all the major media formats is good though, because I don't intend buying a television when I move out of my parents' house, so I'd be really happy to watch streaming videos in my favourite operating system.
Follow me
If a platform runs Windows software better than Windows then developers will only ever write Windows software, leaving said platform as a vaguely interesting curiosity.
The monopoly will only break when developers move away, and they'll only move when they have to.
Deleted
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 $100. IBM's sales force couldn't have sold space heaters in Point Barrow Alaska. IBM killed OS/2. MS just let them.
Best Slashdot Co
Well If you notice the crossover plugin is useing windows media player 6 (i belive) and the reasion they cant run a newer version is because Microsoft added a line in the EULA of media player, saying it can only be installed on a system with MS windows.
So how long untill windows media player 6 just wont cut it? I think the best hope for linux media is MPEG4 and quicktime 6. Even if apple dosent release Quicktime 6 for linux, MPEG4 is an open standard and it will be easier to port something.
It is a bad idea to make any of the content of your site only accessible via a plug-in, sure this software increases the number of systems that a plugin can use, but why bother? Why not create and encourage useful websites that don't need them?
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
I'm a business user with a pure Linux setup and finally I'm able to read those pesky documents with the official Micro$oft viewers.
I don't know, if this violates any license agreements, but frankly, I don't give a shit.
Yes your honor, those evil communists break our monop^H^H^H^H^H customer experience by using CrossOver.
20$ is a bargain and I shelved it out gladly.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Some which the parent missed :
orginal
Hilight
recieve
Oh well. The typos seem to repeat for more than once. Either the person typing the article had some horrible typing habits, or somebody ran the article through a filter deliberately. (for fun?)
I mean, some of those typos are really funny.
Don't quote me on this.
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
I own Crossover 1.1, and reading the documentation that comes with the product, in browser WMP is only supported under Netscape 4.7x, because the Windows WMP plugin relies on Javascript quirks not available in Netscape 6, or Galeon, or Konq, or Opera, or (euw) Moz. My own experiements seem to confirm this.
Has this situation changed?
Yes! On the official screenshots page, they have CmdrTaco's Hamster Havoc animation as a mozilla video plugin demo! Now he's ready for prime time! His liberal arts education has finally paid off!
c re enshots.php
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover/s
There is a small loophole here...
You can install it on MS Windows, but what if I have Windows CD and it's in the basement and not installed? am I legit to install Windows Media player 7.1? I think so..
Hetz (Heunique)
Search on /. for the stories. The BBC just went to ogg streaming awhile back. Oh heck, I'll even post a link:
3 20 6&mode=flat
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/25/185
And a question: How is someone supposed to do a search for the article on the bbc using ogg when the search says words under 4 characters aren't indexed? I found that article by looking for vorbis, but I shouldn't have had to. And I think it didn't pick find the followup story that said the BBC adopted ogg after the testing.
But I can't understand why anyone would use it to play RealMedia content. Although Real's site has seemingly obfuscated the links to it out of existence, there is both a native RealPlayer8 and beta quality RealOne player for linux, with plugins included.
:) This may very well be where CrossOver truly shines in business, making a friendly desktop more feasible. Though most of us will download a file and use some imperfect converter/importer to load it into another editor, or use wine itself to view the material, a lot of business people want the convenience of viewing it in the browser, and for .doc content and the like, this makes a lot more sense than multimedia does in the browser paradigm...
That said, I can barely see any reason to use Windows Media Player from crossover, as a number of linux players (numerous avifile based programs, xine, and mplayer) can play Traditionally Windows-only (avi/asf/wmv/etc.) media in much more efficient ways. With CrossOver, pretty much everything is done in win32 binary format before being put on the display. Whatever you may say about wine's efficiency, it still is simply not feasible to beat native code. With the semi-native players, most of the time they get away with native codecs, resulting in no win32 code at all. Even in cases where codecs have to be pulled from win32 codecs, as little as possible is done there. The file is demultiplxed, the video stream is passed through the win32 dll, and is only required to provide decoding of frames, and in the case of video, usually in the easiest colorspace for that dll to produce. From there, native code takes over, and, if available, passes the data straight to an Xvideo overlay of the appropriate colorspace, and hardware does some filtering, colorspace conversion, and scaling. Even if hardware can't be used, native methods to do this outperform wine-mode code. The only reason I can see is for the plugin aspect of this implementation. Of course, I have always hated the "plugin" style of viewing content, and have always saved to disk when I could. Same with "embedded" playback in file managers (i.e. Konqueror), I always disable that crap...
Now with QuickTime, you have a pretty good reason to use CrossOver, the best (only way) to view Sorenson codec material is QuickTime's player. Plus you get browser embedding if you like that. A little tip for those who just want standalone player, wine is enough to run the full installation. In fact, if you disable ddraw.dll in your wine config, you get CrossOver level cleanness (i.e. no black all over the screen, no messed up menus, etc).
As far as the office format viewing, I have no clue, I don't have to deal with that much
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Well, if they're going to play that game...just install a (legal) copy of Win98 on your machine and dual-boot into Linux...heck, you don't even have to dual-boot! As long as it's install on your disk, your computer will qualify as a "system with MS Windows".
I'd like to add that I did buy the CrossOver Plugin, and that it's all that it's cracked up to be except for two things (which may be related to my configuration): it did not install icons or MIME type extensions (a minor annoyance) and I can't install the Word viewer without the installer crasshing (a medium one). No matter, I think I'm entitled to download updates as they come...in any case, I urge as many people as possible to contribute to both Codeweavers Crossover and Transgaming's Winex project. I mean, their products are relatively cheap and it does help them bring Windows assimilation into Linux closer to being a seamless experience.
Reminder: find a new sig
I'm willing to bet something like a "Department of Obfuscation" to make their apps more Windows-reliant to counter the GPL's general desire of universal compatability.
What the hell are you talking about? "GPL's general desire of universal compatibility"??
The GPL is a free software license. The program featured in this article is proprietary. The GPL says and does nothing to promote universal compatibility. Sure the FSF may support portability, but that is hardly the real issue underlying the GPL. Finally, while this may be a great program, because it is not free software, I am not sure I see the point. If I wanted to run proprietary software why would I run Linux at all? (Hint: Macintosh).
I do not have a signature
These guys are doing a great service in helping to complete Wine. But they are a commercial entity and need funding. Don't let this become another Linux company that believes in Free software that doesn't make it.
p ort_wine.php
This product only costs $25; that's a small price to pay to get stable interoperability with Windows software on Free operating systems.
From their site: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover/sup
CodeWeavers will use the revenue from the end user version of CrossOver plugin to continue its work on Wine as well as to enhance and improve the Plugin product. We feel that this hybrid model is an excellent model for Free Software companies. We are able to contribute, extend, and help a significant Free project, Wine, while still having some mechanism to help us sustain our efforts.
Thus by purchasing CrossOver Plugin, you will be helping to provide a much needed source of income to a Free Software company that has provided a large range of valuable improvements to one of the most key Free Software Projects - Wine.
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
If as much time spent developing great software for running Win32 binaries and strengthening Microsoft's position, was spent towards building a plethora of open-source multimedia applications, we'd be a lot better off. Linux needs more native software that it can run well, instead of software that gives it access to a library of programs that it can run poorly. Plus, the more we support Microsoft's platform, the stronger they get. It keeps us dependent on Microsoft and other proprietary platforms, and gives less incentive to move completely over to Linux. (Think: "if Linux can run Windows software, but not as good, why should I use Linux?")
Again, they are great projects and kudos to them for doing such a great job. I just wish we could see more native software of this nature.
(just my two cents)
Why bother.
Give us a viable alternative that works any better? Quicktime? RealPlayer? Well, for QuickTime (Sorenson codec QuickTime), your choices are either Mac or Windows binary, not much bettter than WMP....
.exe. I have native versions of Real8 and a beta of RealOne for Linux, because I was around when they had them available, nowadays users are screwed...
RealPlayer? Once upon a time, maybe. The quality is crap, but at the very least they *had* native linux player versions. Now, while they are still physically on the site, the non-win32, non-realone real player versions are no longer just difficult to find from the main page, they are now completely gone. They don't even want to support Mac, they are full out Windows now, click on the check out realon player link, and you auotmatically get a
Now, what is left that is a viable alternative? You could use quicktime with a differenet codec, but even then player support under linux is not great. Ogg Tarkin might be good when it is released, but for now it isn't an option.
Now, let's re-examine the situation with AVI/ASF/WMV (of which ASF/WMV is the streaming option). Most of these files can be played under linux (though ASF, and I would imagine WMV are illegal due to patents, but that hasn't stopped projects from putting it in), and many without ever resorting to win32 code. For example, consider MPlayer. If a file is indeo created, it can use an xanim module. If it is divx encoded, ffmpeg or divxdecore can be done to natively open it (though divx is snubbed by MS, so that isn't much of a streaming option). Ultimately, for commercial streaming you would probably end up using a Windows dll, unfortunately, but of the options that you can try to plug through right now off the web, Windows content actually involves running the least win32 code.
When Ogg Tarkin or something like that comes out, *then* you can push forward and protest sites that don't use a good alternative, but in the meantime, the multimedia providers have to serve it *somehow*, and none of the streaming options right now are any better to linux than others.
Until recently, an official MPEG-4 release looked like it could be the ticket, but the proposed licensing really messes that up. And don't even begin to suggest that you could use MPEG-1 for streaming, if you thought Real is crappy at low bitrates, well, just try MPEG at those bitrates and even Real looks better..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It looks interesting, but after playing with it a while your plugin crashes Internet Explorer 5.50 under NT (and perhaps would crash others), leaving lots of pieces-parts scattered around the screen.
-- MarkusQ
The interesting thing that I've found, as I run WineX and play Counter-Strike/Day of Defeat through linux rather than windows, is two fold. First, I've found that the program doesn't crash, Windows isn't running and cannot fubar the program. I've also found that the engine gets better performance than in Windows. Part of this is the kernel drivers for my graphics card, but part is that using the Linux API gives better performance. (W.ine I.s N.ot an E.mulator [Wine is an implimentation of the Windows API in Linux])
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
http://service.real.com/help/faq/security/bufferov errun.html
http://milkshake.dexy.org
I was able to use the plugin to run a few applications that I just couldn't get to run well under WINE. Trillian being one of them.
You might not agree the plugin is best for Linux in that it lets folks continue with proprietary formats (WMA) and prorietary codecs (Quicktime) but it sure is nice to see WINE come this far. Using this plugin I can honestly say I can surf the web and use the net with all the features I want without needing Windows at all. Codeweavers did a good job here.
'Same speed C but faster'
Thanks. I'll check it out.
-- MarkusQ
Just curious...are there any new streaming standards which are open standards, and have the potential to replace Micorsoft's formats?
Actually, this could be the only way Microsoft can knock Linux off it's growth route. Think about it, If a bunch of vendors start moving to the Win32 based WINE, it only means that Microsoft needs to go and tweak the API's again( already had 10+ years of that ). OR, Microsoft could come out with a MS-Linux with thier own REAL Win32 subsystem for their Linux and again, all the apps/API's are under Win32 and under their control.
Personally, I hope that WINE is always, just broken enough so the big apps need to go native. If it's Qt or whatever, native is what we need in the long haul.
IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Then you'd better bar the basement door at night so it doesn't come after the children! Aaaaaiiiiiieeeeee!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes, but the apps already built for the old API will still work, and the new dlls or development systems that require the new API will take a while to filter through (how long between the releases of Photoshop 6 and 7 ?). By which time, Wine can catch up again.
Right now, in most places we still have a choice of formats: Windows Media, Real, streaming MP3, whatever. If everyone just mindlessly chooses the Real formats without a second thought, site operators are going to look at their logs and say "well, nobody is using the Windows Media/MP3/whatever formats, so let's just start webcasting exclusively in Real format." Do you want that to happen? I sure don't. We cannot afford to let RealNetworks monopolize this market. Think of the ramifications of RealNetworks having a 100 percent lock on digital content. Digital Rights Management? Easy... just put it in RealPlayer. Region lockouts? Put it in RealPlayer. Want to work around those problems? Sorry, you can't, because digital media is RealNetworks Media and you don't have any other choice!
I got SolidWorks 97 [somewhat] running [wireframe only] with wine using (transgaming's) winex 1.0.3. I just used winex because I didn't want to recompile wine w/ OpenGL. anyone know of someone who packages wine w/GL buitin? SW 98 and 2000 did not run.
On topic, I bought the codeweavers plugin. I'd like to have an install interface that easy for mozilla plugins on windows.
Codeweavers selling their own distro with this "built in." I am fairly certain they could add $10 to the price of the plugin and sell a modified version of Redhat or Mandrake or Suse or whoever. This would only be a short term solution, but it would be cool, IMO.
I have to label this a Bad Thing(tm). Oh I'm sure Crossover works, and with the proper configuration and hardware, probably works well. But that's what's bad about it.
I don't want to run Windows plugins on my Unix box. I want to run NATIVE plugins on my Unix box. If I can't get Open Source plugins, at least give me native plugins.
Crossover gives Apple/Sorensen, Macromedia, et al, zero incentive to release native plugins. That's not good. Crossover is setting in stone these proprietary plugins as standards, and no standard should be proprietary.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
IIRC, this is a dupe, plus it's old news. I've had the demo for about 2 or 3 months, running Trillian well (but Y! crashes), and Media Player perfectly. My only gripe is that it doesn't install those fonts into X... *envisions a world with fonts that weren't awful*
Not meant to be a troll, though it may sound that way...
--jw
My only concern is does it work with the Outlook Webaccess "feature" or the Web Terminal Server client?
If those two work then this may very well break one of the last barriers that some people were having to using Linux on the desktop...
[Yes.. I know about rdesktop.... but this is a different approach]
--
Time is on my side
Ummm. Why not just use MPlayer it support asf wmv wma and just about every video and audio file I can think of except realplayer. It can accept URLs if I am not mistaken so what is the big fuss about this? who really wants to run emulated when you can go native? Sure mplayer can't be embedded into mozilla but not many sites have embedded video or at least without giving you option to open in a new window! Anyways just my thoughts.
I'll be using Crossover to get my work done. You have a great point on an ideological basis, but get real, you aren't going to change a damned thing by not going to a website that uses a microsoft or quicktime stream. As mentioned in earlier posts, some of us actually use these tools for things other than fooling around and need them for work. Crossover does what I need and I get to use a free (as in beer) OS.
Why use this instead of the browser's bookmarks, I hear you ask? Because YC stores the bookmarks on a Yahoo server. This means that when I add an interesting bookmark at work, for example, it is there in my bookmarks when I browse from home.
If as much time spent developing great software for running Win32 binaries and strengthening Microsoft's position, was spent towards building a plethora of open-source multimedia applications, we'd be a lot better off.
I hear this argument from time to time, and it makes me wonder. The argument assumes that every Linux user who voices their opinion against Microsoft is also a top notch programmer. Sadly, this isn't true. If these people did expend as much energy into programming as they do into complaining about Microsoft, it's doubtful they would be able to produce anything useful. I tend to believe that most of the really talented Linux programmers focus most of their energy on the code they write. That's what makes them as good as they are. The more vocal group includes the rest who have little or no programming talent. If they are unable to program, then they will try to support Linux by doing what they do well, making noise. A lot of this noise may reflect badly on us, but it at least lets the public know we're here.
In OS/2 there was only very basic stuff. So you basically needed windows apps for everything. And there was no signs of a change to the better.
Another difference is that the Linux apps are almost guaranteed to become better over time due to the GPL (and to some extent other opensource licenses). In the end a native linux application will catch up at leat to a level, where you don't need the features of the windows app.
... which cuts off access to other mime-types.
davecb@spamcop.net