SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional Review at Mad Penguin

llywelynelysium writes "Mad Penguin has an excellent review of the upcoming SuSE 9.3 Professional release. The review is mostly positive, commenting on SUSE's improved speed, improved Gnome suppport, inclusion of Xen, and interestingly, the use of Firefox as the default browser. On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support. SUSE scores three stars in the end."

Comments

YOU Fixes MP3 Issues

[mlmitton]

According to the thread here:

http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=1308 6

YOU already has fixes to the kdemultimediapackage that corrects the MP3 problems. I don't know why they'd cripple MP3 support to begin with, but it's nice they fixed things so quickly.

Re:YOU Fixes MP3 Issues

[eviltypeguy]

More authoritative source:

http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2005-Ap r/0665.html

The real thing is that they're not including MP3 support by default due to possible legal conflicts, namely software patents ;) They're available through you as multimedia packs and come with the warning that they should only be used if "legal in your jurisdiction" or something to that effect.

Re:further crippled?

[Too Much Noise]

If removing mp3 further cripples their multimedia support, what is already missing?

mpeg4 and DVD playback

Re:xmms

[NeoChaosX]

And btw who uses mp3s anymore?

Lots and lots of people. MP3 is pretty much a de facto standard for digital music files. Do a search on eMule or any other file-sharing service. Most of the music you'll find in those services is MP3. MP3 has become the word in the mainstream to describe music files, or is at least the one format most commonly associated with them. OGG may be a better technology, but that doesn't take away from the fact that MP3 is more or less another word for "digital music" for years now.

Re:Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3 in many ways.

[jbn-o]

The algorithms used to make and decode MP3s are patented by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (licenses are paid through Thomson). Thus, in countries which observe software patents (such as the US), any implementation of those algorithms cannot be legally distributed without paying a patent license fee. Fraunhofer and Thomson claim that the relevant patents apply in many countries besides the US (warning: this page lists patents you might not wish to become familiar with). The patent holder determines what the fee is and they can change the fee at any time or refuse to issue a license to a particular would-be licensee. Most patent holding corporations tie the license fee to the number of copies of programs distributed (which means such payment schemes are incompatible with free software).

mp3licensing.com, the site which lists the license schedule, lists a one-time payment for the MP3 decoder (between US$50,000 and US$60,000), but as far as I know, nobody has paid that fee. The encoder has no one-time fee, and thus cannot be legally distributed as free software in countries where software patents exist.

I suspect that in some years when these patents have expired, there will be a lot of GNU/Linux distributions picking up support to make and play MP3 files. Ogg Vorbis will still be a better option on technical grounds, however. If you're encoding human spoken voice, consider Speex with or without the Ogg container. I'm very impressed with what it can do in such a small file.