KDE RedHat project

[Paul A Houle]

Steve Bergman wrote:

>
> Adding repositories is not a big deal for us old hands;  It's just a 
> PITA, nothing more.  But the newbie is already overwhelmed by 
> switching OSes.  To them, "Fedora just doesn't support multimedia".  
> All discussions of "feature parity" aside, when's the last time you 
> saw an Ogg Theora stream on Yahoo's site?
>
    Yeah,  streaming media is the worst of it.

    Ogg Vorbis is a fine format to "rip,  mix and burn",  and its what I 
use for ordinary listening -- even if I'm on Windows.  With a good set 
of headphones (digital USB) I can hear the difference between Ogg @ 200k 
and the common MP3 @ 128k,  and definitely Ogg @ 128k is better than MP3 
@ 128k.  Recently I noticed that I could tell the difference between 
listening to the CD and Ogg @ 200k,  which pushes for FLAC,  a free 
lossless format that's quite comparable to ALAC and other commercial 
competitors.

    I still make 64k MP3's to download to my flash player,  but there's 
nothing like Live365 in Ogg Vorbis land.  However,  Vorbis is widely 
supported these days -- years ago I used to argue with an activist 
friends that the difference between putting an Orbis stream online and 
no stream at all was infinitesimal,  but a year later it was supported 
by popular media players in Windows.

    The disturbing development these days are formats like MP3Pro and 
AAC3 which use Spectral Band Replication to throw out the highs and then 
reconstruct fake highs from the low.  These are particularly attractive 
if you're aiming for the "beer commercial" sound of modern FM radio and 
have the audio processing chain to match.  The sound is superficially 
attractive at low bit rates,  but is atrocious if you listen carefully 
-- needless to say,  a whole new set of legal barricades has been built 
against open source implementation of these standards.

-----------

    I'd argue,  however,  that "positive propaganda" is the right 
strategy here too:  if RH (and much of the OS community) takes the 
principled stand of providing a free media stack,  it ought to put a 
little bit of energy into promoting free media formats -- for instance,  
it would be nice to see a web site promoting the Ogg Vorbis streams that 
are out there,  just as there are sites promoting the SBR heresy...

http://www.tuner2.com/