Real to offer Windows Media on Linux

[Calum]

did somebody already say that mplayer has had windows mediocre player support for years?

[mobrien_12]

did somebody already say that mplayer has had windows mediocre player support for years?

Not explicitly, but that was what we were talking about with respect to the windows media player codecs.  It doesn't have open source support for WMP codecs in the way that xmms supports mp3, it uses the same codecs that WMP does.  You can copy them from Windows if you want.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Well, I dunno, I never liked Real Player ... besides most Window$ Media formats are shit. But, whatever, I'm sure other people will have less problems setting up a media player than can handle almost anything on Linux. (Mplayer handles most anything currently)

Ok, maybe it wasn't as explicit as it should have been, but yes I have yet to find something mplayer can't handle.

[piratePenguin]

Not explicitly, but that was what we were talking about with respect to the windows media player codecs.  It doesn't have open source support for WMP codecs in the way that xmms supports mp3, it uses the same codecs that WMP does.  You can copy them from Windows if you want.

Can't it play them via ffmpeg?

Most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project.

FFmpeg have reverse-engineered and reimplemented, among others:

    * The Sorenson 3 Codec used by many QuickTime movies
    * Advanced Streaming Format
    * Windows Media Audio
    * Windows Media Video (and thereby also the associated DivX hack)
    * QDesign Music Codec 2, used by many QuickTime movies prior to QuickTime 7.

[WMD]

They probably mean the older Microsoft MPEG-4 video, not the infamous WMV9 format.

[davidnix71]

I use a Mac. What do you do to get MPlayer to play WM? I can't get VLC to play it most of the time.

Even Flash is difficult outside of a browser. I downloaded a Japanese commercial in Flash and iSquint crashed trying to make it an mp4. It said the file was 'truncated', but it played it Firefox.

YouTube and MySpace are messing with each other, too. The new version of Flash required by MySpace disables sound if you use the older version and go to YouTube.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-ppc-20051120.tar.bz2

these are the codecs ... install them.

Well if I'm wrong they're in here somewhere:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

[Calum]

They should be illegal due to high amounts of suck found in them, as well as multiple counts of douchebaggery.

well said!

[Calum]

regarding the wm9 codec, i believe its uptake has been slight at best, so i'm not worried. i now use mp3 for preference even though it's weak compared with ogg vorbis. the reason for this is that hardware mp3 players of several people i know only do mp3 (not ogg or m4a, the two other main formats for me at the moment). Luckily i have some scripts* to convert any i may download into other formats. These scripts rely on having all the right codecs installed in your /usr/lib/win32 directory though.



* which i fully plan to update in a month or two

[worker201]

I use a Mac. What do you do to get MPlayer to play WM? I can't get VLC to play it most of the time.

From the readme file you get when you download the codecs package from Mplayer:
   

Support for Windows Media formats except WMV9 exists but still has some bugs, your mileage may vary

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html#binary_codecs

You'd probably get better results if you built mplayer yourself, after installing all the codecs yourself.  Which is a pain in the ass, guaranteed.

Personally, and I've said it before, if it doesn't play on mplayer, quicktime, xine, or VLC, then I don't need it.  But you can do what you want.  If you need any help building mplayer, let me know.

[davidnix71]

I have the native mPlayer for Panther, version 2.0 b8. It wasn't finding the codecs folder because I lowercased the name of the folder, codecs instead of Codecs. :o  It was in the correct place, hd>Library. Now it plays things it wouldn't before.

What else can I put in the codecs folder, like for real media or Flash? I don't care if it's "legal" or not. It would be nice to be able to use mPlayer to recode audio and video to more common file types.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

I believe you can put any codecs you want in there, probably even extract the linux package into there (most are dlls and a few others)

[mobrien_12]

They should be illegal due to high amounts of suck found in them, as well as multiple counts of douchebaggery.

You know... we need a chunk on the site with really good quotes like this.

[piratePenguin]

You know... we need a chunk on the site with really good quotes like this.

A wiki would sort that out.

/waits