Why is Vivendi Universal Games making a game on the Tolkien world, when one of their subsidiaries is already been making a similar fantasy type for roughly nearly three years, World of Warcraft? Even then, why do they have the same target frame, 2004 right? I think being practically, the same kind of game, a customer will usually choose one over the other, and not buy the other. This means one of these games will largely fail. I think WoW will be the successful one as it will be more polished with the development time that has gone in. So these games are virtually competing against each other.
Even after that, there are many MMOPG games in production. I don't think they will be too many successful ones because a gamer has only so much money to spend on monthly fees, but more important time. A single MMOPG can consume much of your free time.
So I really doubt the success of Middle Earth Online.
Are you implying that Linux users are cheap people and want to stick with a dinosaur because they have no money? Your wrong.
Linux users are a large variety of people. I was just talking to a friend of mine, that wants to buy a dual opteron system and put linux on it. That won't exactly be cheap either.
When I upgrade soon, I'll put linux on the new system, and I certainly don't want to use some bloated newbie gui distro either. >:)
AC answers it exactly =) I've read all comments as well. Guess what, linux 2.5 now has a flag to disable certain code to not trigger the 2.96.
Some distros question the legality of some parts of MPlayer (while some include Xine in whole when they are almost the same code... like debian did) and this "legality" comes from the distros own intentions, and has nothing to do with MPlayer authors being hostile to binary distrobution. It's GPL anyways.
I find it ironic that a lot of the people telling me to "get over it" are the same people who spent 8 years denying the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency (and some of them are still doing so).
What? Why are you raising a false argument? I have seen no one deny the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency of being in office for 8 years! (from the two elections) However many people agree that he was a very bad president.
MPlayer uses a modified DLL loader from the wine project. The windows dlls used in MPlayer are not tied into the code of MPlayer whatsoever. The dlls aren't even necessary, as most major codecs (there are oddballs, but I only had to use one other once, which I did legally have from a tv-encoder) are supported natively except for Sorenson v3 and WMV9-DRM -- The first I'm not a fan of, and the second I have never seen. All these normal codecs are freely available on the internet already. If you wanted to use them, their use is no different than what you would do when using Wine. So your trying to seem to say that Wine and MPlayer are illegal? They aren't illegal because they are clean reimplimentations. The codec distributions are completely seperate from the source. You have to download it seperately.
And the developers have allowed binaries posted on their website. When they didn't allow it, it wasn't because they were afraid of the windows codecs.
Of course each person has the option of not downloading and using the windows binaries, but I will guarantee that for those who use mplayer as their main video player, when they have the choice of using mplayer's.dll loading capabilities or switching to another video player that has a native linux decoder, they will stick with mplayer.
Um, I use MPlayer, not because of it's dll loading, but because it has the best _native linux decoders_. It can play everything natively, except QT6. I don't partically care about QT6 either.
'If you can't compile a kernel,... or read the DOCS... you're not WORTHY of our player.'
What I'm trying to say is simple. I first used MPlayer in it's very earliest days (0.12?). I was a near total newbie to linux, and actually, this was about the first program I compiled under it. When I went to download it, they prominently said "Read the DOCS" it tells you how to compile it and we're not gonna help you if you don't. So I took that seriously and I read the DOCS. And guess what? It compiled fine, and it played files just fine. I had no problems whatsoever. These were the days when MPlayer wasn't even known, if it was known to anyone, they would say it was damn difficult or impossible to get it working. But that contradicted what I knew. After I read the DOCS, everything seemed easy and I understood how to do it. Then I realized, they already put forth everything you needed in the DOCS to get it working, even to a point a total newbie could understand. And I found myself agreeing with A'rpi, RTFM!! Why should they answer trivial questions when they had already answered it once? So everytime I see someone that failed with MPlayer, I know they failed to read the DOCS even though they were told to.
Can't compile a kernel? Well a kernel compile is easier than it was compiling MPlayer, at the time (just do simple make commands). That is why he said that. If you can't understand how to compile something, then why are you downloading something and trying to do it yourself? It makes so much sense to me.
Well you said the possibility of InterVideo/WMV would mean that WMV could run on non-x86. While it could run on non-x86, it won't lead to the wide-spread adoption of the format because this version is controlled by Microsoft--probably closed source. With ffmpeg, it has a WMV codec and already supports many architechures =)
For recent versions of MPlayer, libavcodec is basically the default for WMV, unless you copy in the DLLs and specifically tell it to use it.
And right now I use the windows DLL's through mplayer on my main computer all the time. So what I want is wmv and wma native to my computer, even if it isn't open source. I can live with it. The dlls I'm using now aren't.
What about libavcodec/ffmpeg? It has an open source and native WMV codec!
There's just some question about using the (free as in beer) DLLs from WMP with it...Of course, if you're arguing from a Free as in speech stance, then nothing here is good. It's closed on Windows to closed on Linux. Zero advancement.
Actually, there is an open source versionof WMV, minus the DRM portion of it. No DLL's required to view them in linux.
MPlayer has it's own open source version of WMV7/8 (WMV1/2?) from ffmpeg/libavcodec. No Windows DLLs required (except for WMV9 but that's because of DRM?)
BTW, MPlayer v0.90 stable version was just released.
It looks like it could be possible, as the icculus guys used SDL to do this. SDL works on OS X right? It's possible but I won't say it will be easy as I don't know how much of the code is x86 asm./
I recently installed the new nvidia driver for mandrake 9.1. The good thing about this new driver is that it automatically figures out what all relevent stuff needs to be installed. (Earlier u had to download specific drivers based on your distribution version). But after installing the new driver, I found out that it *did not* modify the xfree86 config file, which I had to go and manually change. Although it was not difficult, but still it can be complicated for an newbie.
It's nice that it can auto-detect the kernel for you, however, it seems the editing of xfree86 is the distro-maker's part in this. The reason why you probably had to edit it yourself is because you downloaded it on your own an installed it and because the distros haven't been updated to support it. When the next releases of every major distro come out, expect 3D support right on the cd for nvidia cards right from the distros installer.
MPlayer can also decrypt DVD's and convert them to AVI. But Virtual Dub is Windows only =( And most of your tools are probably not available. And most people probably use windows like you say... MPlayer works nicely for simple divx tasks, it's not very hard to figure out, but yes it's not full featured yet.
But you know what, I was just talking about this to a friend, and we're gonna research the costs in doing this same thing maybe even on linux. So I'm gonna check into whether it can actually work.
(yes, I was part of the warforge 'unofficial' beta test, and yes I bought the game the day it was released).
Yes you believe blizzard was trying to prevent piracy uh-huh, but you took part anyway? Your a damn hypocrite.
I was in the REAL beta test. And I was a REAL user of bnetd (NOT WARFORGE __BNETD NEVER WAS WARFORGE__) (I played SC on it because it was better than battle.net usually). You such a awful person to have nearly ruined both my beta tester role, AND a good open source project.
Final statement: You can never stop piracy unless you have the morals not do it in the first place. I wish you'd learn this (and every damn pirate)
From v0.90pre2 changes: "experimental Sorenson 1/3 encoding (using quicktime DLLs) (only to AVI, and these files can only be played with MPlayer! It's needless to mail us about when will be MOV encoding too, as neither we know:) "
It is not complete, but chances are you can encode/capture avi-ish Sorenson with Mencoder. This will probably work with most of the extra filters and encoding options to make changes the video. Seeing.mov support in other programs, I doubt finishing.mov support in Mencoder will take long.
Although I bet linux still not that great for MOV editing/encoding, it's coming along quite nicely right now as you can see.
It might be better if they were support all poor open source geeks. You see, I yesterday was compiling stuff on a 1.2 ghz athlon yesterday under knoppix (this system didn't have linux on it, but I was testing it). And it was surely a whole lot faster than my 333 Mhz comp I use all the time. If I made that jump (which would be at such an insignificant cost to me, but I am poor), I would be so happy to do much more programming. But see, I don't use KDE at all, and probably never will, but I want to work some more on projects like Wine, or maybe some kernel modules/drivers to get some of my hardware to work better. Even though I wouldn't be working on KDE at all, I could be assisting the KDE project in an indirect way, like the kernel, by improving hardware/software compatibility, which is definately necessary for Linux today to continue to grow.
MPlayer plays more than Real Player, or Windows Media Player. And it will work as a GUI just fine for the old ladies. KDE will automatically associate MPlayer (maybe the GUI I don't know). And the old lady wont even care about a simple scaling issue in the GUI (a patch would be ridicously easy), because she won't really even notice. If it's a skin problem, I'm sure there is a good one, or just make one already that works. I bet it's not hard. New ones come up all the time.
You don't have to specify an output device if you don't want to. In X, it will just default to xv, which is good enough for anything. It's just, you might like a different output device, but you gotta try it.
And where you almost forgot, you can use the f key in the player to switch between fullscreen or not.
That leaves -zoom, which does what he wants, but if you can't handle just this one command, then you can just remember the f key.
Seriously? What's so hard about remembering a few options to do what you want? I don't know all the options, just the ones I need. If you really don't want to type it in, just put them in.config/mplayer Heck, also just associate videos in your window manager with mplayer, that way you never have to see a prompt.
The MPlayer GUI, can do pretty much the same as the non-GUI, except the GUI doesn't work like people think it should. So... How hard is it to send in a patch for a simple scaling issue? If you GUI-attached people really want something like that, then do it.
Using MPlayer as the command prompt is the way to go. It works beautifly. Here are some options:
-vo device Selects video output device. Some output devices like sdl, dga, and vesa will automatically select resolutions to fit your video. No resizing required.
-fs
The fullscreen option. It centers the image, sizes to your resolution, keeping the aspect ratio.
-zoom number
Like -fs but number is the factor to change the x/y size.
Examples for full screen play/better resizing: mplayer -vo vesa file.avi mplayer -fs file.avi mplayer -zoom 2 file.avi
"64 kilobytes should be enough for anyone." - Bill Gates speaking to the Windows Notepad development team.
While Windows Users have dealt with the consequences since then, little do they know, that Microsoft have since surpassed the 64 KB limit. When hitting the limit, Notepad forms a secret hook with a little known app called WordPad. This way, you have backwards compatibility with Notepad users, and enjoy the benefits of files larger than 64 KB.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is Vivendi Universal Games making a game on the Tolkien world, when one of their subsidiaries is already been making a similar fantasy type for roughly nearly three years, World of Warcraft? Even then, why do they have the same target frame, 2004 right? I think being practically, the same kind of game, a customer will usually choose one over the other, and not buy the other. This means one of these games will largely fail. I think WoW will be the successful one as it will be more polished with the development time that has gone in. So these games are virtually competing against each other.
Even after that, there are many MMOPG games in production. I don't think they will be too many successful ones because a gamer has only so much money to spend on monthly fees, but more important time. A single MMOPG can consume much of your free time.
So I really doubt the success of Middle Earth Online.
Are you implying that Linux users are cheap people and want to stick with a dinosaur because they have no money? Your wrong.
Linux users are a large variety of people. I was just talking to a friend of mine, that wants to buy a dual opteron system and put linux on it. That won't exactly be cheap either.
When I upgrade soon, I'll put linux on the new system, and I certainly don't want to use some bloated newbie gui distro either. >:)
AC answers it exactly =) I've read all comments as well. Guess what, linux 2.5 now has a flag to disable certain code to not trigger the 2.96.
Some distros question the legality of some parts of MPlayer (while some include Xine in whole when they are almost the same code... like debian did) and this "legality" comes from the distros own intentions, and has nothing to do with MPlayer authors being hostile to binary distrobution. It's GPL anyways.
I find it ironic that a lot of the people telling me to "get over it" are the same people who spent 8 years denying the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency (and some of them are still doing so).
What? Why are you raising a false argument? I have seen no one deny the legitimacy of Clinton's presidency of being in office for 8 years! (from the two elections) However many people agree that he was a very bad president.
MPlayer uses a modified DLL loader from the wine project. The windows dlls used in MPlayer are not tied into the code of MPlayer whatsoever. The dlls aren't even necessary, as most major codecs (there are oddballs, but I only had to use one other once, which I did legally have from a tv-encoder) are supported natively except for Sorenson v3 and WMV9-DRM -- The first I'm not a fan of, and the second I have never seen. All these normal codecs are freely available on the internet already. If you wanted to use them, their use is no different than what you would do when using Wine. So your trying to seem to say that Wine and MPlayer are illegal? They aren't illegal because they are clean reimplimentations. The codec distributions are completely seperate from the source. You have to download it seperately.
And the developers have allowed binaries posted on their website. When they didn't allow it, it wasn't because they were afraid of the windows codecs.
Well I think it will work with all DRM-less media, as I have yet to see one that doesn't work.
Of course each person has the option of not downloading and using the windows binaries, but I will guarantee that for those who use mplayer as their main video player, when they have the choice of using mplayer's .dll loading capabilities or switching to another video player that has a native linux decoder, they will stick with mplayer.
Um, I use MPlayer, not because of it's dll loading, but because it has the best _native linux decoders_. It can play everything natively, except QT6. I don't partically care about QT6 either.
'If you can't compile a kernel, ... or read the DOCS ... you're not WORTHY of our player.'
What I'm trying to say is simple. I first used MPlayer in it's very earliest days (0.12?). I was a near total newbie to linux, and actually, this was about the first program I compiled under it. When I went to download it, they prominently said "Read the DOCS" it tells you how to compile it and we're not gonna help you if you don't. So I took that seriously and I read the DOCS. And guess what? It compiled fine, and it played files just fine. I had no problems whatsoever. These were the days when MPlayer wasn't even known, if it was known to anyone, they would say it was damn difficult or impossible to get it working. But that contradicted what I knew. After I read the DOCS, everything seemed easy and I understood how to do it. Then I realized, they already put forth everything you needed in the DOCS to get it working, even to a point a total newbie could understand. And I found myself agreeing with A'rpi, RTFM!! Why should they answer trivial questions when they had already answered it once?
So everytime I see someone that failed with MPlayer, I know they failed to read the DOCS even though they were told to.
Can't compile a kernel? Well a kernel compile is easier than it was compiling MPlayer, at the time (just do simple make commands). That is why he said that. If you can't understand how to compile something, then why are you downloading something and trying to do it yourself? It makes so much sense to me.
Well you said the possibility of InterVideo/WMV would mean that WMV could run on non-x86. While it could run on non-x86, it won't lead to the wide-spread adoption of the format because this version is controlled by Microsoft--probably closed source. With ffmpeg, it has a WMV codec and already supports many architechures =)
For recent versions of MPlayer, libavcodec is basically the default for WMV, unless you copy in the DLLs and specifically tell it to use it.
But no-one seems to distribute it because of pretty licesing (I'm sure someone must distribute it somewhere) :-(
?
MPlayer is GPL.
And right now I use the windows DLL's through mplayer on my main computer all the time. So what I want is wmv and wma native to my computer, even if it isn't open source. I can live with it. The dlls I'm using now aren't.
What about libavcodec/ffmpeg? It has an open source and native WMV codec!
There's just some question about using the (free as in beer) DLLs from WMP with it...Of course, if you're arguing from a Free as in speech stance, then nothing here is good. It's closed on Windows to closed on Linux. Zero advancement.
Actually, there is an
open source versionof WMV, minus the DRM portion of it. No DLL's required to view them in linux.
MPlayer has it's own open source version of WMV7/8 (WMV1/2?) from ffmpeg/libavcodec. No Windows DLLs required (except for WMV9 but that's because of DRM?)
BTW, MPlayer v0.90 stable version was just released.
It looks like it could be possible, as the icculus guys used SDL to do this. SDL works on OS X right? It's possible but I won't say it will be easy as I don't know how much of the code is x86 asm./
It's nice that it can auto-detect the kernel for you, however, it seems the editing of xfree86 is the distro-maker's part in this. The reason why you probably had to edit it yourself is because you downloaded it on your own an installed it and because the distros haven't been updated to support it. When the next releases of every major distro come out, expect 3D support right on the cd for nvidia cards right from the distros installer.
MPlayer can also decrypt DVD's and convert them to AVI. But Virtual Dub is Windows only =( And most of your tools are probably not available. And most people probably use windows like you say... MPlayer works nicely for simple divx tasks, it's not very hard to figure out, but yes it's not full featured yet.
But you know what, I was just talking about this to a friend, and we're gonna research the costs in doing this same thing maybe even on linux. So I'm gonna check into whether it can actually work.
mencoder does divx encoding.
Yeah, divx and others support high resolutions. They might as well use linux and their own computer setup, it would cost less I'm sure.
(yes, I was part of the warforge 'unofficial' beta test, and yes I bought the game the day it was released).
Yes you believe blizzard was trying to prevent piracy uh-huh, but you took part anyway? Your a damn hypocrite.
I was in the REAL beta test. And I was a REAL user of bnetd (NOT WARFORGE __BNETD NEVER WAS WARFORGE__) (I played SC on it because it was better than battle.net usually). You such a awful person to have nearly ruined both my beta tester role, AND a good open source project.
Final statement: You can never stop piracy unless you have the morals not do it in the first place. I wish you'd learn this (and every damn pirate)
From v0.90pre2 changes: "experimental Sorenson 1/3 encoding (using quicktime DLLs) (only to AVI, and these files can only be played with MPlayer! It's needless to mail us about when will be MOV encoding too, as neither we know:) "
.mov support in other programs, I doubt finishing .mov support in Mencoder will take long.
Mencoder is part of MPlayer."
It is not complete, but chances are you can encode/capture avi-ish Sorenson with Mencoder. This will probably work with most of the extra filters and encoding options to make changes the video. Seeing
Although I bet linux still not that great for MOV editing/encoding, it's coming along quite nicely right now as you can see.
It might be better if they were support all poor open source geeks. You see, I yesterday was compiling stuff on a 1.2 ghz athlon yesterday under knoppix (this system didn't have linux on it, but I was testing it). And it was surely a whole lot faster than my 333 Mhz comp I use all the time. If I made that jump (which would be at such an insignificant cost to me, but I am poor), I would be so happy to do much more programming. But see, I don't use KDE at all, and probably never will, but I want to work some more on projects like Wine, or maybe some kernel modules/drivers to get some of my hardware to work better. Even though I wouldn't be working on KDE at all, I could be assisting the KDE project in an indirect way, like the kernel, by improving hardware/software compatibility, which is definately necessary for Linux today to continue to grow.
MPlayer plays more than Real Player, or Windows Media Player. And it will work as a GUI just fine for the old ladies. KDE will automatically associate MPlayer (maybe the GUI I don't know). And the old lady wont even care about a simple scaling issue in the GUI (a patch would be ridicously easy), because she won't really even notice. If it's a skin problem, I'm sure there is a good one, or just make one already that works. I bet it's not hard. New ones come up all the time.
You don't have to specify an output device if you don't want to. In X, it will just default to xv, which is good enough for anything. It's just, you might like a different output device, but you gotta try it.
.config/mplayer Heck, also just associate videos in your window manager with mplayer, that way you never have to see a prompt.
And where you almost forgot, you can use the f key in the player to switch between fullscreen or not.
That leaves -zoom, which does what he wants, but if you can't handle just this one command, then you can just remember the f key.
Seriously? What's so hard about remembering a few options to do what you want? I don't know all the options, just the ones I need. If you really don't want to type it in, just put them in
The MPlayer GUI, can do pretty much the same as the non-GUI, except the GUI doesn't work like people think it should. So... How hard is it to send in a patch for a simple scaling issue? If you GUI-attached people really want something like that, then do it.
Using MPlayer as the command prompt is the way to go. It works beautifly. Here are some options:
-vo device
Selects video output device. Some output devices like sdl, dga, and vesa will automatically select resolutions to fit your video. No resizing required.
-fs
The fullscreen option. It centers the image, sizes to your resolution, keeping the aspect ratio.
-zoom number
Like -fs but number is the factor to change the x/y size.
Examples for full screen play/better resizing:
mplayer -vo vesa file.avi
mplayer -fs file.avi
mplayer -zoom 2 file.avi
"64 kilobytes should be enough for anyone." - Bill Gates speaking to the Windows Notepad development team.
While Windows Users have dealt with the consequences since then, little do they know, that Microsoft have since surpassed the 64 KB limit. When hitting the limit, Notepad forms a secret hook with a little known app called WordPad. This way, you have backwards compatibility with Notepad users, and enjoy the benefits of files larger than 64 KB.