zoe: itunes m4a and other problems

[zoe at purdue.edu]

Hey,

thanks to all who gave advice on earlier questions;
I was able to mount my hfs plus drive, after discovering that filesystem tag 
is "hfsplus" and not "hfs+ or "hpfs" (I have no idea what hpfs is, but it was 
mentioned in the man page for mount, while hfsplus wasn't.)  I was able to back 
it up with my new DVD burner with little problem, reformat and re-install. 
Thanks :)

After downloading and installing a bunch of individual packages I was able to 
get mplayer, vlc, and ogle to install.  VLC works but is slow.  Ogle didn't 
even have the courtesy to install a man page, and it crashes every time I try 
to launch it, leaving a frozen terminal window behind.  Perhaps I made a 
mistake in installing it.  

I've had the best luck with mplayer, although I had to spend a few hours 
reading the man page.  It will play DVD's, although not very well, the video is 
sort of 'jerky'.  No doubt my PII 350 isn't up to the challange of decoding.  
My understanding of the situation is that I could get a faster processor, or 
try to find a compatible (AGP 1x) video card with hardware DVD decoding.  It 
seems like a new processor might be the more useful of the two, as it would 
make other tasks faster as well.

1. At what point are intel/amd processors able to fully decode/display DVD 
video?  I've seen PIII boards for relatively cheap at the sunday market, and 
with a trade in it probably wouldn't cost too much.  Is a PIII sufficent for 
such a task?  what MHZ should I be thinking about?

2. Almost all of my music is in the iTunes (m4a) format. (a few months ago I 
used an iBook.  cash ran out and I had to hock it.)  Only about 10% of it 
plays, the rest doesn't, mplayer prints out pages upon pages of errors, opens a 
large video display window, then prints end of file.  The music which does play 
is that which I ripped from CD after buying the iBook or that which is in mp3 
format; the music which does NOT play was ripped with an earlier version of 
iTunes on a beige G3.  I've heard of people having similar problems with iPods, 
and I believe their solution was to 'update' the formatting of their music 
files with iTunes.  

Does anyone know what exactly the problem is?  perhaps with the right arguments 
mplayer can play these correctly?  is my only option an XP and iTunes install 
followed by a tedious re-encoding?

3.  Someone reccomended tux commander for use as a file browser.  I've tried it 
and like it a lot.  Specifically, I like the ability to create multiple options 
for file types which appear in the contextual menus.  What I would really like 
to be able to do is create an action for music files which would print the 
absolute path of the file to the last line of a given text file, which could 
then be used as a playlist for mplayer.  Is there a command which will print 
the complete path of a file?  (I know there is a way to do this using the '>' 
symbol, where one can append the displayed text resulting from a command to a 
file ex: cat something.txt > somethingelse.txt)  I know that 'pwd' displays the 
complete path of the current directory, is there a similar command that one can 
apply to a file?

4.  Before, when I was working off the 4 gig. drive and did not have Gnome, 
KDE, or XFCE installed I was able to start an X session which would load only a 
clock and a terminal window.  Now that these guis are installed, this appears 
not to be an option.  Is it still possible to launch x11 without launching 
Gnome, KDE etc.?


thanks,
-Zoe