On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Rick Stevens <ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Red Hat/Fedora play by USA > laws and can't include things that have such issues. SuSE and several > others based outside the USA bypass them regularly. Yes, I know Rick. I've found the hard way that Fedora's media players, as shipped with the OS, are basically useless for playing any media you find on the Net, no mp3 playback, no wma audio playback, can't even play back *.mp4 (MPEG 4 layer 10, aka H.264) files downloaded from Youtube via keepvid.com... And common media players like MPlayer or VLC do not come in 'statically linked' versions that one can just download as a single file and run, while booted off a LiveCD... (yes, one can 'yum install mplayer' but it's painfully slow and the app is obviously gone at the next reboot). You might say "why don't you install the OS and be done with it?" and you might have a point, but it's still a sad reality of the Linux world that there's no "download and run" media player available on Linux that doesn't need a ton of dependencies installed. Ironically, on Windows the user can just go to any "portable apps" site and download a single .exe file that contains everything needed for media playback. On the other hand, I've found jlGui which being Java based doesn't need more than itself and the Java JRE available (runs just fine under OpenJDK 7, luckily included in the LiveCD), http://www.javazoom.net/jlgui/jlgui.html ... and can even be launched with a single click from a web link using Java Web Start (with the provided Icedtea web launcher).... http://goo.gl/b7QwY BUT, there's always a BUT.... Unfortunately it does MP3 and Vorbis playback, not WMA... The good news is that their pure-Java mp3 decoder is even licensed under the LGPL... http://www.javazoom.net/javalayer/javalayer.html Back to WMA... I suspect Micros~1 must have a patent or two on wma audio playback... yet ffmpeg authors reverse engineered their own wma decoder back in 2002. Too bad ffmpeg isnt even included in the F18 livecd, otherwise it'd be a matter of creating a jlGui wrapper using this http://code.google.com/p/jjmpeg/ Oh well, will keep looking. Thanks everyone. FC PS: For the curious, I have tons of radio shows recorded in DVD-R in low-bitrate, mono .wma files, files often being 100MB+ in size each and containing four hours of audio.... which I often want to cut in tiny snippets, for which I use the Linux freeware (not FOSS, but freeware) http://www.radioactivepages.com/asfbin.aspx from the command line. But in order to be able to cut it, first I need to be able to hear the files to find cut points. PS2: No, converting all files to other format is not an option. And installing F18 to HD, as of right now, is not possible. Maybe soon, but not now. So I'll keep using F18 off a LiveCD for now... -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
