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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?
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.
it's early - or late - re-read the article after coffee/sleep and you'll see that it addresses QT: standalone is flaky, embedded rocks, and it's "just like Windows" version to the reviewer.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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 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!
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
I know. It annoys the hell out of me too. Typos are one thing, but how people can go through life without understanding the differences between words like to and too, where and were, and there and their is beyond me. It's not really that hard. Are these people really as dumb as they sound?
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
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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'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?
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.
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.
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'