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Native Sorenson Playback Comes to Linux

Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.

8 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Linux is catchings up... by Phroggy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This isn't a knock against linux or other *nix's just points out what the weakest links are.

    And a working Sorenson codec available for Linux is a good step toward closing some of those gaps.

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  2. Re:Linux is catchings up... by 1010011010 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    application developers DONT WANT to target Linux

    That's a problem, but the crappy sound support (OSS, Alsa will be better), non-existant color management (X says: what's that?), poor font support (-including-a-strange-30-year-old-craptacular-nami ng-convention),
    "window managers" making window placement a quirky and non-standard thing, etc. -- are all much more serious problems.

    I like Linux, it runs on my home computers 24/7. But, as Linus recently noted, "all the interesting stuff is on the desktop" -- it's where the most work is needed at the current time.

    How many things in X will we need to fix?
    * font support

    * color management

    * alpha blending support

    * usable configuration (Think Mac, Windows, even BeOS)

    * changing resolutions on the fly

    * vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor -- from another computer.

    --
    Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
  3. Re:Licensing? Patents? by G-funk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stuff them, release it AC somewhere, post it here, then by the time somebody starts to "cease and desist" it'll be too late.

    --
    Send lawyers, guns, and money!
  4. This is NOT clean-room implemented by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you read the thread you will see that the author looked at Apple's QT binaries for codebooks to decode some of the encodings. I'm sure there are EULAs that prohibit this. This patch is going to have a lot of legal problems. That's a shame because it is a big boost for QT and thus for Apple, but that's the way it is. I grabbed a copy of it so that when they get an injunction from Apple I'll still be able to post it somewhere in the Free World (ie, not in the US).

    1. Re:This is NOT clean-room implemented by blakestah · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This logic is all confused. You all assume this relates to copyright infringement. It doesn't.

      Patent protection is valid against reverse engineering. Clean room implementations are irrelevant. What needs to be shown is that the functionality is accomplished without using any of the methods in the patent. This is true whether the person making the decoder knew of the methods or not. This is 'working around' a patent.

      Clean-room reverse engineering is useful for making work-alikes of copyrighted methods. In those cases, copyright protects specific expression, and not methods. So, using a different specific expression to accomplish the same methods is fine. The same algorithms can be used.

  5. Re:who cares by LiENUS · · Score: 3, Insightful

    saying divx is better than quicktime is like saying msie is better than the gimp
    they dont compare
    qt is a container
    you could say qt sucks avi is better
    or sorensen sucks divx is better
    but not qt sucks divx is better.

  6. Re:YAXSP (Re:Linux is catchings up...) by 1010011010 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So what you're saying is that, at the moment, there is no alpha support, usable configuration, resolution and color depth changing, or VNC support, and that there is also no color management support in X applications -- is the XCMS broken? Why don't people use it? Color management gets used on Macs. Why not X, if it's been supported for 15 years?

    SO your post comes down to, "We can use freetype to render truetype fonts." Yeah, okay, what about the -ugly-and-wierd-font-descriptors-it-uses?

    --
    Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
  7. MPEG-4 codec will even the playing field by AIXadmin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The whole purpose of MPEG-4 is that it takes the player out of the game. All that matters is that you can decode/encode MPEG-4. In a year or two, Sorenson should be irrelevant, and XINE will just need MPEG-4 support.
    That being said, doesn't MPEG-4 have some pretty herendous licensing restrictions of its own?
    Slashdotter's, none the less, should be campaigning for sites to support MPEG-4 . If they want Linux, and *BSD to become fully supported across streaming sites.