Openoffice media player

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 07:45 +0200, tony wrote:
> Le dimanche 01 mai 2005 à 22:06 +1000, Rodd Clarkson a écrit :
> <snip>
> 
> > since gstreamer has grown up
> > enough to be a viable backend.
> 
> Now that is what I call a subjective opinion...
> 
Sure, the world's full of subjective opinions.  Of course, I didn't say
that gstreamer was perfect, I just said that it had grown up enough to
be a viable backend.  Given that this is the direction that GNOME,
Fedora and it would appear KDE are keen to take in terms of handing
media formats it's probably fair to say that you'll have to endure
gstreamer while it is 'fixed', or use some none fedora supplied
alternative.

> When totem and gstreamer are capable of playing back DVB (live TV and
> recordings) out of the box I will say they are grown up enough for me.
> When it knows that I have dvdcss installed and play MPAA crippled DVDs I
> will say viable.

I play DVD's (region encoded, dvdcss protected) at the moment and
playback is quite good.  One of the really nice things about gstreamer
is that the media formats are handled using plugins, so Fedora can
supply the formats it feels comfortable in using and you can easily add
other formats as you need.

A good place to look for this is the gstreamer website
(http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/) Add the necessary yum repo
information and then install those extra bits that gstreamer doesn't
come with on fedora.  I'm using the FC3 repo on the gstreamer site with
FC4T1 (updated to current) and it's working quite well.

> Until that day xine (which also has xxmc mpeg2 acceleration on my
> machine) will stay player of choice.

I don't know how xine compares, but as I understand it adding support
for other formats/codecs requires a rebuild in xine which makes it quite
awkward for the needs of Fedora, Redhat and other distributions who do
not want to supply no-free formats, but who are trying not to make it
hard for users to add, by themselves, after the install.

Xine certainly had a jump start on gstreamer, but I believe that
gstreamer tries to do a little more than xine in terms of functionality.
Regardless, with GNOME using is for the media backend and KDE very
seriously looking at it (offering the chance at a unified media
framework across desktops - a Good Thing (TM) in my opinion*) Fedora
would be made to ignore it.


Rodd

* see the comments regarding opinions at the top of the reply. ;-]