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Linux Not Supported For Democratic Convention Video
bucketoftruth writes "If you browse to the Democratic Convention website and attempt to check out any of their upcoming streams, you bump into the following limitation: 'We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.'"
Biden his VP choice is against net neutrality
I think Obama has lost his mojo.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It requires Silverlight. If you spoof the agent string, it asks you to install both Silverlight and Move Network's media player plug-in.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
It says you have to install Silverlight to see it.
I hate to say it, but Flash has existed, and been a viable option, for long before Silverlight, and it's got a far greater install base. Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.
Does silverlight for linux exist?
Short answer: Yes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Here's the direct link to CSPAN's feed
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=cspan/cspan/wmlive/cspan1v.asf&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_2_primary?MSWMExt=.asf
Would it function well enough, or is their notice legitimate?
It wouldn't work: this is Silverlight rearing its ugly head again.
You might be able to get away with user-agent spoofing and Moonlight, but I don't know how far along Moonlight actually is.
$ apt-cache search moonlight
mono-smcs - Mono C# 3.0 compiler for CLI 2.1 (Moonlight / Silverlight)
I'll take that to mean "not far enough." Although you can download builds directly from the Moonlight site itself.
These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code.
That would seem to settle it: not quite far enough, unless you're willing to build it from source. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere, will, and let us know how it goes.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Rather than everyone speculating WHY they chose to use such an annoying setup and complaining here, let's just all Email them and let them know we are not happy and why. I did (not that I even WANT to watch the video). Doesn't take long.
Here is the Email address: info@demconvention.com
There's Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player to choose from.
I'd suggest h.264 in an mp4 container. Quicktime will play it, Media Player should play it, and Linux (totem/kaffeine/xine/etc) will play it.
Flash is the known quantity -- it works on Linux, just not very well.
But I think pretty much all of the ones you suggested are a better choice than Silverlight, in its current state.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Complaining about this on Slashdot does little to change it. Instead, please send your complaints to: info@demconvention.com
Ugh. What could these possibly offer that couldn't be done with, say, Flash?
I just went to Move Networks' web site, and the FAQ mentioned one thing that FLV doesn't appear to offer: automatic switching to lower or higher rate streams depending on network conditions. (Remind you of RealPl[buffering...]ayer?) Now all we need to do is start politely female-dogging to Move Networks to port its player to Moonlight, the Free implementation of Silverlight.
Sheesh, we even had a story about McCain's tech platform (once he finally formulated one).
It specifically says that he believes in protecting children from porn and the RIAA's War on Sharing, but NOT 'prescriptive' legislation like Net Neutrality.
Flash certainly can do live streaming. In fact, the APIs for streaming vs. on-demand are very similar.
There may be some Flash based solution similar to this, but Limelight seems like a viable option to stream live video to a LOT of people.
Limelight is a content provider so if the content were Flash they could provide that as well. The Silverlight packaging of the DNC video probably has nothing to do with Limelight
Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
For *live* streaming, I suspect that it's far cheaper to set up a bunch of Windows Media servers than it is to set up a bunch of Flash servers.
Flash Streaming Server licenses are *extremely* expensive. There are open-source alternatives, but so far as I know none of them are very good at handling thousands (or tens of thousands) of simultaneous connections.
Windows Media servers, however, are just regular ol' Windows servers -- couple hundred dollars per box with no user limits, and they do quite well with heavy loads.
Unless Adobe manages to compete better on pricing, or unless some of the open-source alternatives get better at scaling to thousands of users, then I bet we'll see more and more developers pushing Silverlight without Microsoft having to pay them to do anything.
And note that I'm talking about *live* streaming, not streaming prerecorded stuff like YouTube.
Netcraft confirms it.
I can't believe you guys didn't notice this yet. You're slipping.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, JohnMcCain.com uses Flash for video, and I can watch it fine on my Linux box. (To be fair, so does BarakObama.com.) Regardless, the site uses Silverlight, which is a bit ridiculous. Flash has been around for years, and works on most computers that you need video. Not that I care what they're saying anyway ...
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.barackobama.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:02 GMT
Server: PWS/1.3.22
X-Px: ht dal-btn-n15
ETag: "74ea62-af3-48b339d1"
Content-Length: 1220
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:01:37 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1446
Expires: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:08 GMT
Connection: close
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.johnmccain.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 106909
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.johnmccain.com/Home.htm
Last-Modified: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:41 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"18c861ab137c91:280"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:59 GMT
Connection: close
You can also try: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
Most signs point to the fact that McCain hates Linux, not Obama.
-rd
Ever try exporting messages from Thunderbird to anything else? I'm trying to do it right now, and oh yeah...
Tbird stores email as the text mbox format. Just copy/ftp the file. No problem!
Still, you've got to be a geek to know that. But as a /. reader, you are supposed to be a geek and therefore know how Tbird stores email.
At least in any MS product that I've ever seen, there's ALWAYS an option to export data out as a lowest common denominator
Outlook gives you the "opportunity" to export emails as tab- or comma-delimited files. What app, besides Outlook, knows how to import tab- or comma-delimited email files????
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There's a huge TCO advantage in the Move Networks delivery technology, as it can take advantage of ISP web caches so that multiple viewers on the same network can watch the same file chunk, cutting ISP's in-stream bandwidth requirements hugely, as well as outgoing bandwidth needed. For content like this which has a huge simultanous audience, that means scaling up is much, much cheaper.
http://www.movenetworks.com/why-move/frequently-asked-questions
Move Networks also offers pretty seamless rate adaption, so you don't get buffering messages as available bandwidth changes.
I'm not aware of anything else like this availble in FOSS or generic MPEG-4. Most MPEG-4 software players and live encoders don't even support RTSP stream switching.
My video compression blog
If I recall correctly, he was the head of the commerce committee that was in charge of the network neutrality bill being pushed through a couple years back.
The guy was in charge of regulating the internet. And called the internet a series of tubes.
I don't even know what analogy to come up with in comparison. Car analogies are welcome ;)
This is not the funny you're looking for.
I think considering his experience he has an idea of what Linux is.
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/cbcd3a48-4b0e-4864-8be1-d04561c132ea.htm
How so? PWS was the precurser to IIS...
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
It somewhat works on Linux, but it has issues. Search the Ubuntu Forums for "firefox flash crash" and you'll know what I mean. I currently can't watch Flash without Firefox crashing. After the crash it works fine for ~one-two Videos, then it will crash again inevitably. Also crashes on any other Flash content, like navigation elements. Without a Session Manager (using the one from TabMixPlus) and NoScript browsing would be unbearable.
From what I gathered at the Ubuntu Forums this is an issue with Flash 9 and PulseAudio, hopefuly it will be fixed with Ubuntu 8.10.
So, Flash works on Linux, but not very good, and especially not very good on one of the major Linux distributions.