OT: Launch.com music videos under Mozilla and Linux

[Gerald Thompson]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

> On 11/15/2004 04:09:44 AM, Gerald Thompson wrote:
>
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I kind of like watching music videos on the web and was thinking 
>> that  we seriously need to start putting some market pressure on 
>> Yahoo to  make Launch.com work on Mozilla and Firefox under Windows, 
>> and even  pressure them to switch to real media format so that the 
>> videos will  work on Linux.  (They will never switch to an open 
>> source media  format so forget that right now, Real Player 10 works 
>> fine on Linux  so if they switch to Real Media they will be able to 
>> hit the Windows  audience, Mac audience, and Linux audience all at 
>> the same time.)
>>
>
> There are several mac users, and several linux users, who do not want  
> Real on their machines. Myself included. I don't even have it on my  
> Windows machine, where it arguably is a good player.
>
> Don't dismiss open source as possibly providing a viable option.
>
> If you look at gstreamer.freedesktop.org - there's some pretty 
> exciting  stuff going on right now with respect to open source media 
> technology.
>
> Not just players, but streaming server technology.
>
>
Its not that open source alternatives are bad, it has to do with the 
people who control the music videos themselves.  Trust me when I say 
this the record labels will never release music videos under GPL 
technology.  They already force launch.com and rollingstone.com to pay a 
lot to put the videos up on the site in the first place.

It is the very openness of open source solutions that scares them.  They 
won't release under open source solutions because of market share and 
because they won't release under any technology that could allow 
stripping of the audio stream on the video.  The thing about open source 
development is that we all want open source technology to be 
unrestrictive and customizable, music companies will never go for a 
solution like that, they want anything music or video related to be as 
locked down as possible. 

Right now I would just be happy if mplayer plugin would work on 
launch.com or if they used real media which I have found works fine on 
my Linux box.  At least Real Player willingly makes a version of their 
player for all OS's, whereas Quicktime and Windows Media Player don't 
want to play nice with others.

All I am saying with this thread is that if we all send input to Yahoo 
and other multimedia web sites and let them know that we open source 
users have a voice in the world, then they will stop developing their 
web sites as though MS Windows and IE are the only things that matter.  
Even RollingStone.com does it, I can only watch videos on their site if 
I make my browser say it is IE under Linux.  They play fine if you run 
Mozilla on MS Windows, but Mozilla and Real Player on Linux they block.  
I would even suspect that they are doing it deliberately.  Yet you can 
go to http://guide.real.com/ and the same videos that appear on 
rollingstone.com are on real.com's site and they play on Linux from 
real.com.

You may hate the closed source media formats, but my gripe is that some 
of the closed source media formats are allowed to work on Linux and they 
are being blocked by the web developers.  Thats what I want to put a 
stop too, the web developers need to wise up and stop using crappy 
activex controls to do everything on their sites.

Gerald