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Turbolinux Licenses Windows Media 9
spike-288 writes "According a press release, Turbolinux is the first major Linux distributor to license and ship a media player capable of streaming Windows Media audio and video. The new product, "Turbolinux 10 F..." is based on Turbolinux 10 Desktop but will also include licensed versions of Macromedia Flash, legal commercial DVD playback (via Cyberlink's PowerDVD player), RealPlayer 8, commercial Kanji fonts and iPod support via gtkpod (including enhanced functionality)." Update: 04/28 02:33 GMT by T : Prostoalex adds "The Windows Media codecs for Linux will be available for download for $64, the complete TurboLinux OS will cost $150 in Japan and the United States."
RealPlayer 10, coming this summer, adds non-open source components like RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, Flash, etc. to the Helix Player
;)
So.. What does it do? Its a player with no codecs of its own? Its a YAMP? The exciting things in open source media these days are OGM, OGG, Theora, Matroska, and MPlayer's upcoming NUT container. I remember a lot of hype about Helix, but I have to say I'm much less than impressed with the player from Real as it stands. Helix sounds like a huge improvement over that, but that's like saying herpes is better than prostate cancer.
But then again, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
What difference does that really make? The Ogg Vorbis audio format sucks.
I'm not trolling here. You can check my karma and previous posts if you'd like. I'm all about open standards.
However, if the Ogg Vorbis video codec is going to be anywhere near the quality of their audio codec, I won't use it.
Before you mark me as a troll, encode something at 320kbps in Ogg and in 320kbps using LAME, and tell me that the difference isn't so amazing you'd wonder why you ever used ogg in the first place. (Besides the fact that it's totally open. That IS a major selling point.)
I guess the main point here is that we shouldn't be sitting here relying on "The Ogg Vorbis" people or the like to bring us something open. Why aren't we working on changing the general attitude towards these things, so even better codecs are developed open in the first place?
Don't place a band-aid on the wound. Stop it from happening in the first place.
Sig.i>
Either way, WMV codecs stink.
Try skipping around in a video. WMV will hang 6/10 times -- especially on videos that use lower bitrates.
You can skip around in MPG just fine.
AVI's (i.e. DivX encoded for example), as long as you've got reasonable keyframes, you can skip around a movie/video all you want and it works great.
Even without DRM, WMV is a rotten codec.
Riiiiiiiggggghhhhht... that's what we do... make numerous copies of our own music and movie files.
Lord all mighty... this got old many moons ago. "I make copies of music/movies i've purchased outright". Alright... maybe you do mr/mrs oneinamillion. Dance around the bush all you want, there really is an issue of PIRATING out there. One which you are defending no matter how eliquently you word it. Blind extremes to either side of an argument are never good.