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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.
Licensing? Patents?
Someone care to explain what the team did about
these little problems?
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;
Apple's QT streaming server is free and open source, and runs well on both Linux and FreeBSD.
You can download a precompiled version from here and the source code from here or by checking it out of their public CVS server.
application developers DONT WANT to target Linux
i ng-convention),
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-nam
"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.
ctrl-alt[+-] changes the size of the viewport, not the resolution of the display -- it's still whatever x whatever, but you can see only a small window of it at a time. To actually change the resolution, you need to reconfigure and then restart X.
The Unix VNC server is actually a modified version of Xfree86 3.x, using a memory framebuffer instead of video hardware.
However, it would be nice to have a version of VNC that plugged into Xfree 4.x and exported the existing display. X has hooks for this, so it should be possible w/o modifying X or producing a special version of it (like with the current Xvnc server). This would allow the viewing of the current desktop from another machine. Yes, X is a networked display, and can display apps running on another machine. But that's not the same as what VNC does for a Windows machine (for instance), or what VNC exporting an existing X session would do.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
>> font support
Already prety damn decent, if you use freetype 2.1.1
Yes, some display support has improved. How about printing? How about font installation? How about obtaining font metrics and outlines from the font system -- oh, wait, you have to ask X for the path and then read the font file yourself, that's right, duh.
>> alpha blending support
Keith has also included this in his set of X updates, alpha support is included
Where? Link? I'd love to see it. All I've seen to this point is his "twm" demo, which was slow and limited (according to Keith).
>> usable configuration (Think Mac, Windows, ven BeOS)
Actualy redhat, mandrake, etc are comming a long way with this. (admitedly not there, but closing in)
This must be one of those invisible features. How do you install a driver, change the refresh rate, color depth, resolution, etc. without editing
>> changing resolutions on the fly
Configure your X for multiple resolutions, and switch between them with ctrl-alt +/-
This does not change the resolution of the display, only the size of the viewport.
>> vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor from another computer
VNC was made by AT&T, had has clients & servers for almost every platform, including linux
I'll refer you to my other post about this... see below.
Most of the stuff you mention is pure FUD, or outdated.. (so outdated that you should be comparing linux to windows95 then)
Please research a bit more before trying to spread more FUD
It's not FUD, and you're actually the one who's mostly wrong, not me. Plus, you're a little touchy, aren't you? I mean, X isn't a sacrament or anything, and I'm not even suggesting that it has to be replaced.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Here is what you are looking for
x0rfbserver
badness 10000
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).
Please contact me at your earliest convenience at jeffrey AT firehead DOT org. I run the site listed in my .sig and am used to dealing with all sorts of legal BS. I would very much like to see this code out there, and could definitely help with a proper release of it.
Yes.
QuickTime Streaming Server
RTP/RTSP Tutorial
deus does not exist but if he does
DDC. Yes, XFree86 supports DDC level 1 and level 2. Look in XFree86.0.log and you'll see XFree86 talking to your monitor, discovering refresh rates and supported resolutions, then populating your modelines with what it found. It's all automatic and has been for at least a year.
and here's a much better one, as long as you're running KDE. passwords work, has an optional confirmation box, and even supports Tight encoding!
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.
Try x0rfbserver This does what you want. It's been around for years and years.
VNC's approach of setting up a separate display is a design feature, designed to take advantage of X's natural ability to support more than one output display. You can also start the regular old AT&T VNC server such that it also starts X in the same session, giving you the same effect as x0rfbserver. This has been there since day one with VNC.
I only wish the Windows and Mac versions of VNC let you start a session that *didn't* control the current display. This is a failure of the design of the windowing systems under Windows and MacOS. Please don't attribute your lack of knowledge of VNC as a failure in the design of the X Window System or the Unix version of VNC.
--Be human.
The only other thing X keeps track of is the size of the root window. I propose that the server send a ConfigureNotify event to whoever is listening to the root window (probably the window manager) indicating the new size. The window manager can then respond to this by moving and resizing windows (using whatever rules it wants) to get the resized display. Of course the window managers will need to be rewritten but I expect this would happen very quickly.
The only other thing is the screen size macros on the Display object. It would also help if xlib was changed so requesting the screen size either did a round trip or a signal was added to indicate that the local copies need to be updated. However I don't think this is vital and it can be ignored as most applications don't use the screen size for anything except to figure out the resolution.
Uhmm, I don't know about your experience but I've never, ever found pr0n in Quicktime format. It's always Real (crappy), mpeg or some bastard AVI format. In the olden tymes it was ViVo or Real..but never Quicktime.
The only good this does is let linux users watch quicktime trailers (after they download no doubt).
What about MPEG-4 on Linux? I haven't really looked for it, but I was just wondering how well, if at all, it is supported, since the new QuickTime 6 preview supports it.
:)
MPEG-4 is really sweet stuff. Just as a test today, a friend and I encoded an entire full-length movie that was captured via FireWire DV and encoded it into a 653MB MP4 file using QuickTime 6 on OS X. I was amazed at the quality. It blew away MPEG-1/VCD, DivX, and even Sorenson in video quality, and the audio quality was quite good too, all while fitting on a single 700 MB CD-R.
I would love to see DVD players support MP4 playback from burned CD-R's. The quality is actually good enough that you can sit back and watch a movie distributed on a single CD and just enjoy it without being annoyed by poor quality video and audio.
MP4 will really revolutionize video... if the licensing issues don't kill it before it gets off the ground, but that is another story
Oh man. Yet another "X sucks" troll. I have no idea why I waste my time with these, but here goes... (and in HTML, no less :-)
I could really stand folks spending 15 minutes doing research before writing these critiques. OTOH, I guess I was successfully trolled, so what do I know?
Man, that must have been uncomfortable!
-- Serge K. Keller
Hehe, best argument I heard yet. It is well known that all computer progress comes from porn: why else would people need more bandwith, better monitors and larger harddrives? To store Word documents? I thought so ;-)
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
As nearly as I can tell, you need to also lay out a similar wad of cash for an encoder to produce "hinted" quicktime video that's usable with Apple's free streaming server.
If someone knows of a free or cheap way to encoder or convert video to include "hinting" for use with Apple's open-source streaming server, please speak up!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Is it really politically correct to write native software for Linux anymore? Isn't the main focus of Linux now an emulation platform for Win32?
That would be huge good news for consumers everywhere (assuming MPEG-LA gives up on the per-minute fee).
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.