The GStreamer project aimed to do this and xine already has support for demuxer, codec, output, etc plugins (indeed all the DVD features used by xine used to exist as a totally separate project at dvd.sf.net).
And it was the xine guys (erm... OK hands up, me) who first separated the DVD nav stuff from Ogle sufficiently to be used in other projects (including, now, mplayer).
Do you have a shell account on the box? I assume so otherwise you wouldn't be able to install NTP even without a firewall. If you have a shell account, they probably allow ssh through the firewall and so you can tunnel the NTP ports over SSH. This assumes you have another machine outside the firewall that has access to NTP and an 'always-on' connection.
Well of course anything which used libdvdcss under *nix already gets RPC2-agnostic CSS software-decoding. I, personally, have never set the region-code on my one-year-old drive and watch films quite happily using the wonderful players available.
> Do this: Go buy any old digital camera and > try to download the pics on a RedHat system./me opens konqueror using gphoto2, pictures appear (along with nice thumbnails). Drag and drop to folder on my HD.
> Go buy a DVD-R and try to burn a disc.
check. No problems here.
> Go to any old website showing media > (RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media) and > see how successful you are at viewing content.
I can listen to the BBC radio programs via RealPlayer, watch trailers from apple.com and even view embedded WM[VA] files -- the crossover plugin rocks.
> Buy a Firewire DV Video Camera and see how > successful you are in getting the video off > and editing it.
Er... plug-in, record via cinerella, edit.
> Try to visit a site that's made for IE./me types http://www.microsoft.com into Mozilla... all works here.
> Go to the store and buy a game./me looks at his shiny new Quake III and UT 2003 boxes -- oh and I'll be getting NWN soon.
> Buy a PDA and get it to synch up.
Heck, I can even FTP to my Zaurus. I can sync my g/f's Handsprint Treo too.
> Your network card doesn't work, find somebody > you know willing to come over and fix it.
I've never had a network card that wont work (and I've had many network cards). Besides all the cards I've ever bought in the last two years have had Linux modules on the floppy that comes with it.
The problem is that any NDA which restricts the right of the beta testers to distribute the distribution is in violation of the GPL. If the NDA mentioned doesn't remove the rights of the GPL and the beta-testers just don't re-distribute voluntarily, then the GPL isn't violated.
The GPL only protects distribution rights for the people you distribute to, it doesn't require that you personally release it publically, only that you can't stop the people you do give it to from doing so.
RCE isn't a problem these days. It essentially relied on a flaw where a lot of players would report themselves as Region 0 when in multi-region mode. As you say, all the disk has to do is check and reject the disk if doesn't report back the region the disk was expecting.
Actually I have a RCE disc which would foil this. Star Trek:TMP (directors cut) explictly checks for a region one machine. A multi-region player which plays this disc isn't a multi-region player -- its just one that has been set to claim to be region one.
Region codes on a player are actually stored as a bit-field where having bit 'n' set means the player can play region 'n+1' disks. So-called 'multi-region' players allow the user to set this bit-field to 0xff and hence 'play all regions' [Note this means that 'Region 0' plyers are better termed 'Region 255':)].
Some of the bigger studios (notably Fox) are starting to use something called 'Region Code Extension' (RCE) on their disk. With this the first commands the DVD player find on the disc are (in pseudo code):
let r = Region Code;
if(r == 1)
jump to movie
else
jump to naughty person page
endif
Where 'jump to naughty person page' jumps to a still-frame saying somthing like 'You can't play this disk in this region'. A multi-region player can't cope with this since it reports its region mask as 0xff so will still jump to the still-frame.
Only a plyer set to play region 1, and only region 1 can play the disk. Hence to play it you need a DVD player which allows you to reset the region an arbitary number of times (rarer) rather than a 'multi-region' one (more common).
Of course some Linux DVD players simply have a 'region' field in their config file which defeats this:)
*bangs head against keyboard* I wasn't suggesting that we move X over to DirectFB, only that it is easy to port X to use another compositing engine (e.g. OpenGL). An X-server with uses OpenGL could run on Windows, IRIX, HP-UX, Frame-buffer OpenGL, even XFree86... I used XDirectFB as an example of how its quite a small amount of code once you have a compositing engine.
From the DirectFB web-site, they support Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550, ATI128, Voodoo 3, NeoMagic, Savage and CyberPro.
An OpenGL X-server would support any cards which have an accelerated OpenGL driver available (including a GeForce).
Myself I have an ATI Radeon and a nVidia GeForce4 and both manage to work with DirectFB (admiterdly the nVidia needs a patch but that is a packaging issue).
Would you really try to run a fully-alpha blended X-server on hardware that couldn't cope? No. In a similar manner you don't use fade-in transparent menus on 486s. No-one would be forced to use it (remember this is X so the programs would still run on older machines, they just wouldn't use the translucency/genie extensions).
This is a common misconception. With this you don't literally throw PostScript at the X-server. Instead this library presents a drawing and compositing API with similar semantics to PostScript (i.e. it is a stack-based protocol with elementary drawing commands such as 'MoveTo' and 'DrawTo'). All commands are issued via function calls however not by parsing PostScript (which would introduce a) a huge overhead and b) security questions as you said).
True Display Postscript can be thought of as a rich-text version of the X11 protocol, there is little protocol-based computation which can be initiated on the server by the client, instead it simply encapsulates a set of vector and bitmap srawing commands within a consistant protocol.
Not a great deal if you just wanted it to work. Writing a rootless X server where each window is an OpenGL texture is certainly possible (with a similar amount of work to the XDirectFB rootless server for DirectFB). With the DirectFB server translucency is certainly possible (screenie).
If the X-server was written using OpenGL textures, they could be mapped onto any mesh and hence the Genie effect would be fairly easy to implement.
On the other hand... remember DIVX?
codec for windows media player?
That is 'DivX;-)'. DivX was a 'disposable rental' disc (kinda like a MPEG-4 based DVD) that was designed to let you play in 'n' times before becoming unplayable and you could then toss the disc away [i.e. you can rent a movie but don't have to return it to the store]. The problem was a) It was expensive to buy the players, b) The quality wasn't great, c) HArdly any titles were available and d) You could only play it 'n' times.
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If you cast your mind back to the 'hologram' in the Captains cabin in the original Seaquest DSV, that used /exactly/ this technology.
Actually devfsd does (see here). Most distros use DevFS + devfsd these days (notable exeption off the top of my head is RedHat).
The GStreamer project aimed to do this and xine already has support for demuxer, codec, output, etc plugins (indeed all the DVD features used by xine used to exist as a totally separate project at dvd.sf.net).
And it was the xine guys (erm... OK hands up, me) who first separated the DVD nav stuff from Ogle sufficiently to be used in other projects (including, now, mplayer).
Wasn't that actually the libavifile guys...
Actually the English civil war (Charlie and Oliver, etc) was 200 years _after_ Columbus.
Do you have a shell account on the box? I assume so otherwise you wouldn't be able to install NTP even without a firewall. If you have a shell account, they probably allow ssh through the firewall and so you can tunnel the NTP ports over SSH. This assumes you have another machine outside the firewall that has access to NTP and an 'always-on' connection.
Well of course anything which used libdvdcss under *nix already gets RPC2-agnostic CSS software-decoding. I, personally, have never set the region-code on my one-year-old drive and watch films quite happily using the wonderful players available.
Surely this should be 'neighbour'
> Do this: Go buy any old digital camera and /me opens konqueror using gphoto2, pictures appear (along with nice thumbnails). Drag and drop to folder on my HD.
/me types http://www.microsoft.com into Mozilla ... all works here.
/me looks at his shiny new Quake III and UT 2003 boxes -- oh and I'll be getting NWN soon.
> try to download the pics on a RedHat system.
> Go buy a DVD-R and try to burn a disc.
check. No problems here.
> Go to any old website showing media
> (RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media) and
> see how successful you are at viewing content.
I can listen to the BBC radio programs via RealPlayer, watch trailers from apple.com and even view embedded WM[VA] files -- the crossover plugin rocks.
> Buy a Firewire DV Video Camera and see how
> successful you are in getting the video off
> and editing it.
Er... plug-in, record via cinerella, edit.
> Try to visit a site that's made for IE.
> Go to the store and buy a game.
> Buy a PDA and get it to synch up.
Heck, I can even FTP to my Zaurus. I can sync my g/f's Handsprint Treo too.
> Your network card doesn't work, find somebody
> you know willing to come over and fix it.
I've never had a network card that wont work (and I've had many network cards). Besides all the cards I've ever bought in the last two years have had Linux modules on the floppy that comes with it.
Everyone knows the Universe is only 4000 years old :)
The GPL only protects distribution rights for the people you distribute to, it doesn't require that you personally release it publically, only that you can't stop the people you do give it to from doing so.
Surely if the aim of the codec is to reproduce the sounds in such a way that it sounds better to people then this is a valid technique.
A babelfish English transtaltion can be found here.
The errata sheet can actually be found here. The link in the story was only Vim's home page.
Fit a Pizza-oven to it as well and we'll never need to go out again...
Actually I have a RCE disc which would foil this. Star Trek:TMP (directors cut) explictly checks for a region one machine. A multi-region player which plays this disc isn't a multi-region player -- its just one that has been set to claim to be region one.
Some of the bigger studios (notably Fox) are starting to use something called 'Region Code Extension' (RCE) on their disk. With this the first commands the DVD player find on the disc are (in pseudo code):
let r = Region Code;
if(r == 1)
jump to movie
else
jump to naughty person page
endif
Where 'jump to naughty person page' jumps to a still-frame saying somthing like 'You can't play this disk in this region'. A multi-region player can't cope with this since it reports its region mask as 0xff so will still jump to the still-frame.
Only a plyer set to play region 1, and only region 1 can play the disk. Hence to play it you need a DVD player which allows you to reset the region an arbitary number of times (rarer) rather than a 'multi-region' one (more common).
Of course some Linux DVD players simply have a 'region' field in their config file which defeats this :)
*bangs head against keyboard* I wasn't suggesting that we move X over to DirectFB, only that it is easy to port X to use another compositing engine (e.g. OpenGL). An X-server with uses OpenGL could run on Windows, IRIX, HP-UX, Frame-buffer OpenGL, even XFree86... I used XDirectFB as an example of how its quite a small amount of code once you have a compositing engine.
An OpenGL X-server would support any cards which have an accelerated OpenGL driver available (including a GeForce).
Myself I have an ATI Radeon and a nVidia GeForce4 and both manage to work with DirectFB (admiterdly the nVidia needs a patch but that is a packaging issue).
Would you really try to run a fully-alpha blended X-server on hardware that couldn't cope? No. In a similar manner you don't use fade-in transparent menus on 486s. No-one would be forced to use it (remember this is X so the programs would still run on older machines, they just wouldn't use the translucency/genie extensions).
I can run KDE quite hapilly on XDirectFB and the screenshot I linked to was running GNOME!
True Display Postscript can be thought of as a rich-text version of the X11 protocol, there is little protocol-based computation which can be initiated on the server by the client, instead it simply encapsulates a set of vector and bitmap srawing commands within a consistant protocol.
If the X-server was written using OpenGL textures, they could be mapped onto any mesh and hence the Genie effect would be fairly easy to implement.
codec for windows media player?
That is 'DivX ;-)'. DivX was a 'disposable rental' disc (kinda like a MPEG-4 based DVD) that was designed to let you play in 'n' times before becoming unplayable and you could then toss the disc away [i.e. you can rent a movie but don't have to return it to the store]. The problem was a) It was expensive to buy the players, b) The quality wasn't great, c) HArdly any titles were available and d) You could only play it 'n' times.