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Xine Gets Native Sorenson3 Decoding
gooofy writes "Freshly (im)ported from ffmpeg, xine 1-beta12 finally has native support for Sorenson SVQ3 video. This means that you're finally able to
watch the latest quicktime trailers on any xine supported hardware platform, not just on x86. Other goodies in this release include support for ogg/theora, playback of cd/dvd over the network, improved handling of mpeg-2 files
(resyncing) and many detail improvements."
One less reason to run a Intel platform.
Less is more !
Could droping in its source tree the new version ffmpeg in lieu of the one that comes with it make Mplayer support native Sorenson 3 too? Or would some additionnal modifications be needed in the Mplayer source?
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
Most movie trailers and stuff that i'd need quicktime for are embeded in webpages. It's a pain in the ass sometimes to find the url for the file you want and download it so you can play it.
Liberty.
But is this legal? I'd like to watch my legally purchased DVDs on my Linux box, but it seems I have to break the law by using the decss routines to do it.
to get all this free publicity? The ffmpeg and xvid people do all the hard codec work and the mplayer people support every codec, container format and play even severely broken files, setting new records for tweakability to get it to excel even in really bad circumstances (it can play DVD in real-time on my EPIA-M 9000, using software AC-3 with stereo downmix; go ahead and read all the reviews that say it can't be done even under Windows where they have hardware MPEG-2 acceleration and use an external S/PDIF decoder).
xine is always lagging behind. Their main "innovation" is that unintuitive and ugly GUI. WTF were they thinking when they created a GUI that is unusable without all those tool-tips?
I have no idea whom the xine people had to bribe to get all this slashdot exposure, because it sure as hell didn't earn it on technical merit.
Yeah, lame troll... Xine has much better performance on older PC's, and also has much better synchronization for NTSC MPEG-2 such as DVD's. Mplayer is more of a bleeding edge player, is great for transcoding/encoding stuff, and gets new codecs before Xine, but it is really jerky on NTSC MPEG-2 (dunno 'bout PAL). I prefer Mplayer for encoding DVD's to AVI's in Linux, and watching DIVX and DV AVI files, and I prefer Xine for DVD's and its support for DTS passthrough. But, if I'm going to use a separate program for file/DVD playback, I might as well just use Ogle for DVD's, since it now supports DTS and Dolby Digital passthrough. Xine supports seeking in streams though, so it has one advantage over Ogle.
You know what? All the programs are great, and I really like having a choice. Now if only I could figure out if it's legal to sell HTPC's that have Open Source DVD software pre-installed (with source code included).
Oh, BTW, all three are Free and free.
Man do I NOT miss Linux.
Says the PFY as he fires up MPlayer(having downloaded the illegally-distributed Windows DLLs from the mplayer authors) to watch The Matrix trailer. I seem to be saying this a lot on slashdot lately, but, get a grip!
Linux has half a percent of the desktop market. Apple, with MacOS, has something like 4-5%, I think? Maybe 8% tops? Why exactly -should- Apple give a hoot about Linux? They're not THAT big a company, and they're busy as hell(have you stopped to think about how many software products they now produce? OSX, OSX Server, Quicktime Streaming Server, Quicktime, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Final Cut Pro, iDVD and DVD Studio Pro, iCal/iSync...the list is ENORMOUS.) They don't, quite frankly, have the time to screw around with, essentially, something that can't even be called "competition"(Apple's products have always represented the complete antithesis of Linux - coherence, ease of use, simplicity, elegance...)
I've owned Macs for years, and no-official-quicktime-or-wmp-player doesn't bother me. Why? Because there are clever(if sometimes annoying) people out there who figure out how to do it themselves. While Apple hasn't released a player, their normally vicious legal department has, by its lack of action, practically applauded mplayer for using the quicktime-for-windows DLLs. Apple's not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, basically. They get their cake(quicktime support on linux for those who really want it) and they get to eat it too(nothing to develop, maintain, or even support). Besides, the DLLs are getting used the same way a Windows application would use them- about the only thing Apple could get the mplayer guys on would be distributing the DLLs alone and without license.
You say, "oh, but Apple just doesn't care enough". Apple cares about lots of little things, including people making themes that look like Aqua. Their legal department has no qualms about making a mountain out of a molehill if something displeases them(this is actually one of the things I hate about Apple the most- their legal department head is a total psycho-policy-bitch, completely the wrong thing for a cute-and-cuddly computer company. Lady, get a job at MS or something, you may be making a hit in the legal world, but you're pissing off thousands of Apple customers and techies with every move you make.)
Please help metamoderate.
This would be great considering that the alternative would be to use expensive Apple software on a Mac.
You mean $30 for quicktime pro?
Certainly you can pay more for better encoders from sorenson, but I'd hazzard a guess that if there are ffmpeg encoders for sorenson they're probably not even on par with apple's basic one since its only just been announced.
Yes it would. CSS is optional, and any reasonably professional DVD burning app will let you burn a DVD with or without it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Just don't confuse legality with morality, and you'll be able to sleep at night just fine.
Jeremy
Looks like KXine hasn't been touched in over half a year. KPlayer and KMplayer, on the other hand, seem to be progressing nicely. I won't be happy until some backend issues are fixed, though, like smooth seeking/rewind/fastforward and single frame advance/rewind. Seems like no linux media player is interested in tackling these issues. Quicktime is the only player that gets it right. But it is windows/macos only and has annoying advertisements and Flash-like "features". I want my movie player to just play movies, not be a "media center" where "media" is defined as "whatever stuff AOL/Time Warner/Disney/Sony/etc. want you to be paying for today".
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
You could not possibly be more wrong. The current generation mplayer (G1) will probably die soon, but there still is work going on. A'rpi, who was the driving force behind mplayer, has decided to start a complete rewrite from the base up, for now called mplayer G2 (yeah, mplayer has a thing with bad names). From what I've been reading, it seems to be going fairly well. Check out the current status on the (all of week-old) mailing list here:e v/
http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-g2-d
So it's okay to beat up the 'bad guys' like Apple and Microsoft, but get pissed when someone violates the slightest part of the GPL?
How many GPLed programs are causing a serious problem with deliberate file format lock-in?
I have mac and I NEVER USE QuickTime, Videolan and Mplayer are much better. With QuiclTime it is not possible to play a movie full screen (that is, if you dont want to pay $30 for the pro version). If you want to play a DVD in QuickTime, you have to pay other $20. Videolan does all this for free and much more (Vor example it can play DVDs from all zones).
.ogm (ogg) movies.
I LOVE the keyboard shortcuts in Mplayer, especially navigating forward and backward with the arrow keys, I can skip whathever stuff I want withot using the mouse. Compared to Videolan and Mplayer, QuickTime is an inferior product.
Another shortcoming of QuickTime: if you want to play an Xvid or Divx file you have to convert it first. Also, unlike Videolan, QuickTime does not play
Sheesh! mplayer has been 100% GPL since version 0.90-pre1.
Repeating made up numbers doesn't make them true. The fact is that nobody knows how many people are using Linux. It actually seems likely to me that there are more Linux desktop users out there than there are OS X users (many of them dual-booting Windows).
In any case, no matter what the market share is, Apple needs to realize that Linux users can cause them real problems: as this shows, the Linux community is capable of developing codecs themselves if Apple doesn't supply them. In the long run, that erodes Apple's control over a market segment that they desperately want to control. Linux MPEG-4 encoders are already among the best and fastest in the business, for example.
Of course, that's what I would like to see happen anyway: so, keep up the good work--keep NOT shipping proprietary codecs for Linux, we don't want them anyway.