On Tue, 27 May 2003, Keith Winston wrote:
> So we agree that Windows has huge problems, so much so that even YOU
> won't use it at home. We can work our way up from this common starting
> point.
What started me off on this thread was the following assertion made
earlier:
"when I see people complaining about the lack of "out-of-the-box" features
for a GNU/Linux distribution _compared_ to Windows, I find that almost
insane."
In the context of multimedia that was being discussed, that is just plain
nuts. Red Hat's multimedia is simply crippled. When you consider that the
latest and greatest Red Hat cannot play DVDs, cannot play MP3, cannot play
any video, nor any streaming media, it's mind-boggling how anyone can make
that assertion. Out of the box, RH9 cannot play ANY web multimedia that
matters. At least Windows can play some formats out of the box, which in
practice covers much of web content. People talk about OGG and DivX, but
they are still marginal formats that are practically irrelevant on the
web.
I don't place all the blame on Red Hat, of course. I accept that they have
good reason to cripple RH multimedia, but it's still crippled. You had to
get practically all your multimedia capability from Freshrpms. Even xmms
needed the MP3 retrofit (and for KDE, there is no such easy "fix"). I'm
immensely grateful for Freshrpms, but its importance demonstrates Red
Hat's shortcomings.
Because Freshrpms' RPMs are not always current or are not always built
with the features I wanted (or with featues that I do NOT want), I've had
to build my own software. But these things now depend on so many libraries
that it's generally a pain to build. I've built mplayer and transcode from
source after much grief. Plus there is the need to find the various win32
codecs, and Quicktime is packaged separately. So it sounds a little too
glib when people talk about how easy it is to retrofit their multimedia
setup. It certainly isn't the same as clicking the "get RealPlayer" or
"get Quicktime" link on a web page.
> For multimedia, I use XMMS for mp3/ogg, Ogle for DVDs, and Mplayer for
> everything else. I got all of the RPMs from freshrpms.net and had no
> trouble installing them. There were a few dependencies to figure out
> for Ogle and Mplayer, but all of them are available on freshrpms.net and
> it took me about 30-45 minutes to get everything I needed. Again, the
> only thing I don't have working smoothly is Quicktime.
Actually, Quicktime works relatively well ("well" by Linux standards) for
me with Xine, which now plays Quicktime natively. I also grabbed the full
complement of win32 codecs -- demonstrating our dependence on the Windows
world -- and installed gxine. The latter has its problems, but it's the
most convenient way to get WMA/Quicktime to work as a plugin.
Chris
