[NCLUG] video

[Michael Dwyer]

"Aaron D. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> William Dan Terry writes:
> > Any suggestions for video player apps? I want to play mpeg, qt and
> > mov on my Linux box. I've got Gnome on X. I've been looking
> > around. Some of the options that sound good (at linux.org and
> > gnome.org) don't have working links. So I thought I'd get
> > suggestions. Funny thing is that I can play mpegs on my ipaq running
> > linux (not X so I can't use the same app), but am not finding
> > obvious desktop options.
> 
> mplayer.  Though they strongly discourage binary distrubution at this
> point.  So finding RPMs or .debs isn't necessarily easy.  And the
> authors aren't necessarily helpful.  And the docs are best classified
> as sucky.  Also, the GUI interface is pretty non-functional last time
> I tried it.  But if you have a strong need to play that video, mplayer
> is your best bet.  It has a wedge for using Win* DLL codecs, so most
> formats you can play on Windows can be played on Linux if you're
> willing to install the proprietary codecs.  Oh, it can build a .deb
> right out of the source tree, which is nice for us Debian-using folk.
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

Goes to show you how long I've been out of the loop...  I've always
counted on XAnim for my unix video needs.  (
http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html )  It is getting pretty long in the
tooth, while at the same time, I was impressed that there is still some
active development on it.  He's also got some work into a nextgen player
of some kind.
Apple locked up the Quicktime Sorenson encoder pretty tightly, so it is
only able to play up to QT3 -- but then, that seems to be the case
across the board.  It has a number of binary-only libraries that can be
used to support some proprietary codecs, but oddly, MPEG was always one
that XAnim wasn't very good at...  Anyway, he is looking to the Wine
project to allow him to link to Windows DLLs, too.  Nifty trick, if I do
say so myself.