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The Next Generation of XAnim 96

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oms-is-almost-ready-too dept.
You don't hear much about xanim anymore, but it's certainly an old stand by (FAQ: Yes, you can use it to play cinepak encoded movies if you have a few closed source modules). But are you curious about what's happening with old faithful? rsk noted that the next generation xanim featurelist is online. It's not ready yet, but it's nice to see an update.
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The Next Generation of XAnim More

The Next Generation of XAnim

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  • Any video news on Linux is good. The video players suck under it. RP Alpha is the only one that's passable. MTV is ok, but it's too small (window size, unadjustable) and stops working after a few minutes. The remaining ones freeze up and go too slow and are generally not high-quality. If there was finally an all-in-one video/media player for Linux that actually worked, it would be a boon to the community.

  • Re:Quicktime codecs ? (Score:5)

    by update() ( 217397 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:51AM (#649103) Homepage
    It's worth mentioning, though, that overzealous "advocacy" is part of the reason Apple hasn't released a Linux QuickTime player. There was a post on a QuickTime list from one of the project leads describing his frustration with hate mail from Linux users and his impression that the large majority believe they are entitled to everything on their terms and that a binary-only Linux release would have generated more hostility and bad press than benefit to Apple. (Sorry, no URL. Apple is changing their listservers and the archive isn't up yet.)

    As psergiu said, "polite".

  • Have a look at gstreamer [sourceforge.net]. It's a media framework just like xanim wants to be, but it has these advantages:

    • Open source (xanim is not)
    • Fuctioning code in cvs (xanim only has a webpage)
    • Can do advanced stuff like autoplugging (ie. give it a file, video window, and a audio output and it does the rest of the connections. Give it a video input, a audio input, a codec muxer and a network connection, instant video confrencing)

    Currently it supports about a lot of the input/output options that xanim says it will support. There are just a few developers working on it. If you can lend a hand I'm sure they would love it.
    --

  • Xanim (Score:1)

    by skyfish ( 2889 )
    This is nice to see but xanim, even with all those new listed features, is still years behind MS Media Player. Its not important that something just play avis anymore. It needs to have support for popular codecs (Divx and such). Ive never seen anybody in their right mind encode something in cinepak if they want it to be less than 1GB for an hour. I admit that iim not familiar with implementing codecs into a piece of software like this, but speasking as a person who has every episode of DS9 encoded on CD in Divx, I would never encode something in cinepak. And until Xanim (or whatever they decide to call it in the future) can play my eps, MS Media Player is still lightyears ahead.

    skyfish
    (dedicated debian user)
  • Did anyone miss me.
    --Shoeboy
  • And every time someone emailed him about it, Cmdr Taco delayed the Slash code release 24 hours!

  • Too much duplication of effort (Score:4)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @01:46PM (#649108)
    * Quicktime for Linux does [rare] MJPEG encoded Quicktime for Linux
    * Xanim doesn't fully support MPEG1
    * SMPEG is also only MPEG 1 based
    * XMovie does MPEG2
    * AviFile is an interface for MS-MPEG4, among others
    * Livid [library] and OMS [player] plays DVD movies
    * RealPlayer plays RealMedia content and nothing else

    Each of these libraries implements the same features over and over again. Different rendering modes, resampling for screen sizes, fullscreen mode, player interfaces and skinning, plugins [visualization, etc] etc.

    This is a massive duplication of effort and [unlike similar duplications of effort] neither project covers the full spectrum of whats ouyt there [compare this to KDE - GNOME, which both happily run whatever apps are out there providing the libraries are installed].

    We need to put a standard for pluggable codecs / extensions [an extension being a parent for other codecs - eg, the AviFile version of WINE, or a non-Real interface for RealPlayer codec]. Perhaps integrate it into SDL if appropriate.

    The result would be a standard api [which a number of players could be used on top of] suitable for Audio and Video, and easily extensible. Can the developers of all the projects mentioned in this thread start please talking to each other?

    ---
  • Which troll has the lowest user number?
  • And that's what both Open Source and Free Software are... philosophies that pay back later. Some of it pays off now (gimp, Konqueror, qmail), but it's the potential that, once it hits critical mass, will pay off in the future.

    Qmail is NOT [cr.yp.to] open source software, by any definition of the term. The author has never accepted patches that I know of, explicitly forbids the distribution of modified versions, and will never, ever permit a fork.

    And frankly, that's probably a good thing, as it's the reason why qmail is not the horrid mess that sendmail is and that postfix seems hell-bent on becoming.

  • Hell yeah.

    Welcome back, shoeboy.
    What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?
  • RealNetworks sucks anyway. See this article [grc.com].
  • But with DivX ;-), isn't QuickTime dead? Sorenson or any other codec? OK, the AVI / DivX ;-) combination is not streamable, but for Star Wars trailers, TV show episodes or movies you don't really need streaming anyway. I hope the promised 2nd generation [projectmayo.com] will come up with something easy to use that is *free* and available on all platforms. No more closed codecs...
  • It's similar to the Napster philosophy - "sharing is good as long as I get more than I give" type thing.
    I hobby-code in a fairly competative field. We're all cooperative, but I only like to distribute version x of my code after I've started using version x+1, which is faster/better of course. Share - but only so much.

    Donc je m'accuse.

    Sue me.

    FatPhil
  • I'm sad to see the vast number of different sound and video players available for Linux/Unix - xanim, aviplay, smpeg, xmms, mpg123 etc. All with a different set of supported encodings. When is someone going to do it ``The right way'', and define a codec interface for loadable modules. Then these codecs could easily be integrated into your favourite full-screen player, web browser etc. Futhermore, it would be impossible to provide all codecs open-source. With a standardized interface, commercial codec providers would have an easy job supplying codecs for the linux community.

    We are shooting ourselves in the foot by reinventing this with every few weeks by providing a new player for your specific format.
  • w/ wine and the dll, anything is possible. look at how avifile handles divx; it lets the dlls handle the video encoding/decoding. whether it's legal or not, however, is the question you should be asking. the divx dlls are basically freeware; what's the licensing on the dlls used to handle the formats you're talking about?
  • it's actually avifile which he speaks of. avifile is a lib, that can comes w/ avifile, and can be used by other thing (such as xmps or xmms) to play avis.. aviplay is a QT-based player that utilizes the library. it, of course, included with avifile. i'm not sure whether it's supposed to be more than just an example of HOW to use libavifile (i got the impression that it wasn't), but it's definitely the most featureful avi player available.
  • I hate to agree, but media player 6.4 is great. It'll play practically any format, and pretty skip free. MP7 however sucks. MS had to go take a good thing and add a whole bunch of useless crap. Skins? Skins are great on a window manager level, or wiget level, but for one app? That and now MP7 plays things with all sorts of skipping and on occasion I've had files not play properly (go a bit then crap out) in mp7 that work fine in 6.4. The *only* thing that I liked in mp7 was playlist, but since when I am in windows I use winamp for my mp3 viewing (I don't really think you need a playlist for your mpg pr0n), that's not a big deal. Sad but true, mp6.4 would be a great app to have, or have the equivelant of, on linux.
  • Jane and Joe mightn't care, but that doesn't mean it's not important. It also doesn't mean that noone cares.

    Sue Secretary certainly cares when Word and Windows continually makes her day a misery. How she wished that she could get her boss to hire a freelance programmer to fix the bugs that _really_ irritate her! Unfortunately, her boss would love to spend a bit of money to allow her to be more productive, but it's just plain impossible to fix bugs in Word or Windows. Worst of all, Microsoft aren't supporting these versions anymore, and so won't fix the bugs. Sue's boss would much rather give money to a programmer who can fix their problems than to the company who has abandoned them, but he has no choice.

    Don't be a dick. These things really do make a difference to normal, everyday people in normal, everyday ways. Not caring about them is like not caring about what kind of insurance you have on your house/car/whatever.

    I'm getting sick of the "what about your car's code?" question. Realise that free software is designed for general purpose computers, like PCs, as opposed to embedded, special purpose stuff. It may also apply to these things, but I dunno, I haven't thought about it enough yet.

    On first glance, there does appear to be some merit for it, at least once a model of car has been discontinued. If you drive an older car, one before all this computerized gadgetry became embedded in them, then it's relatively easy for you to fix your car when it breaks. You can go to any spare parts place and get what you need, and failing that you can probably fashion it yourself out of sheet metal or a similar model or something.

    But if it's the embedded computer which needs fixing, and the car company has told you that they don't support your car anymore (and so won't sell you spare parts), you're substantially more fucked. In fact, you're basically stuck with the proverbial car-with-hood-welded-shut. It's the computer, not the hood, that's welded shut, but the effect is the same. If the car company had decided to release the source and specs to your car as free software, then you and other owners of your car, perhaps with similar problems, could fix it. Hell, you could even make it better, fix any bugs or tweak things to be exactly how you like them! The patches and tools could be available on the Internet. If you can't do it, then you could hire someone to do it for you - techies could make a living doing this kind of thing on weekends. It's really the same as Sue Secretary's case.

    Like I said before, don't be a dick.

  • not trivial (Score:5)

    by dboyles ( 65512 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:53AM (#649120) Homepage
    A lot of people are trivializing this article as "just another software announcement" - and an old one at that. True, "Slashdot is not Freshmeat!" But I say it's much more than that. I don't have the URL handy, but there was recently a survey of current Windows users (including CEOs, CTOs, and IT admins). The subject was "Given that UNIX is considered much more stable than Windows, why not migrate?"

    IIRC, about 4% said a move to a UNIX-based OS would result in incompatibility issues. Another 7% mentioned having to retrain employees. But approximately 84% replied that UNIX - and Linux in particular - has no support for viewing pornography in a video form. One Fortune 500 exec noted that the online porn industry is rapidly migrating to streaming video because of the high availability of bandwidth. Until Linux, BSD, etc. decide to support this vital part of the market, Microsoft will continue to dominate.

    yes, of course I'm kidding
  • Doesn't work for me (debian unstable) :(
    After downloading the trailer from the official site, and trying to play with xanim I get:



    $ xanim finalfantasy_320.mov
    XAnim Rev 2.80.0 by Mark Podlipec Copyright (C) 1991-1999. All Rights Reserved
    Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18)
    Unknown(and unsupported) Audio Codec: QDM2(0x51444d32).
    Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
    Usage:
    XAnim [options] anim [ [options] anim ... ]
    -h lists some common options, but may be out of date.
    See xanim.readme or the man page for detailed help.


    :(

  • I noticed this is going to be under a proprietary "free for non-comm" license.

    Are there any gpl'd players out there that will:

    1) Use the video4linux api;
    2) play realtime onscreen with controls;
    3) optionally create a video file (prefer mpeg but others are ok).

    TIA.

  • for the media format impaired (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apple will likely not produce a working version of quicktime with sorensen for a long time. Apple is the only person who can produce this since they practically own the format through a very restrictive agreement with sorensen. AVI will also likely never be completely supported under linux (natively that is) simply because AVI is a wrapper format much like wav (ever seen those mp3 files that are wav files). AVI is simply a file format wrapper around hundreds of codecs (from DV, indeo*, mpeg4, mpeg2, etc. ) Quicktime is similar to this, but without as many formats, nearly all newer ones use the sorensen codec. If you look around you can find avis that aren't supported in linux or other OSes outside of windows. Media player will check its website on missing avi codecs and download the specific codec needed automagically. If you want to create videos seen on nearly every platform, do it with mpeg1. It's the only decently safe format out there. Hopefully mpeg4 (when native codecs arrive) will completely replace it. This isn't an attempt at a troll, but an attempt to educate the readers on what is possible and what isn't possible. Sure it's possible that apple will release quicktime for linux, but not for a long while until its worth their time and people treat them with respect instead of acting like 13 year old skript kiddies.
  • if you try to play a sorenson enocded quicktime file, xanim dies with the message that it cant yet play sorenson encoded quicktime and hopes to in the future. i also hope they will in the future or i wish mac would realize there is a large (large enuf anyways) target market who would love to see sorenson encoded quicktime. some who might even pay..

  • pr0n. (Score:4)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @11:49AM (#649125) Homepage
    Because people make typos when they are typing with just one hand.
  • yes, exactly what im talking about. wouldnt it be nice to see arguable (or not) the best cg ever made?

  • Which troll has the lowest user number?
    Mholve does.
    --Shoeboy
  • Next Generation ? It will still be 3 generations behind :-)
  • :(

    foolish me
    my money was on Bruce Perens, but mholve is way lower.

    Thanks.
  • If your employer is watching your surfing for keywords like porn, spelling it differently could keep you out of trouble.

  • is....s.o...jer....ky....th..at...I...use....x..mo ..vie
  • Realtime video encoding is extremely processor intensive - I tried using VideoRecorder for BeOS to do this a few weeks back, but using any sort of compression at all it would drop almost every frame, and using raw video the files were HUGE! This is on a P2-350, which I know isn't exactly top-of-the-line, but you'd still need a ridiculously fast box to do it.
    --

  • Re:Too much duplication of effort (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, but that would make sense...

    Until something like this happens, I will continue using Windows Media Player. Whatever you think of Microsoft, this product and the the supporting infrastructure (Directmedia/Activemovie/Directsound and all that stuff) is awesome. If you don't believe me, try playing with the filter graph editor (graphedit.exe) sometime. The only complaint I have with Media Player is the new version 7 interface. I have played fullscreen MPEG-1 3200k/sec files on a 486-100 will full screen anti-aliasing flawlessly. Linux has a lot of catching up to do in this regard.
  • pr0n is more of a geek term than one for l33t-haX0rZ -- look it up in The New Hacker's Dictionary [hax.org]
  • Presumably Apple is striving for widespread acceptance of quicktime. I don't think a project lead throwing a hissy fit because some Linux users weren't nice to him furthers this goal.

    Don't release it then; I won't use it. I can frankly do without streaming video and my favorite radio station (WFMU [wfmu.org]) has MP3 streams.

    What these companies keep forgetting is that the multitude of incompatible streams and players will soon eclipse bandwidth as the single greatest reason that streaming on the 'Net is a waste of time. Then, one day, Ogg's [vorbis.org] video codec or something similar will put that whiny project lead out of a job.

    Good for him.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • A lot of comments are saying "who needs xanim?", but right now it looks like the only player that supports RTSP+RTP+H.263, the only documented and standardized way to do streaming video.

    But it's too bad it won't be Open Source.
  • Where could I get aviplay? I did a search for it but couldn't find it...
  • Here's a prediction for you. In a few years time, when Linux and other Free OSes have a very substantial market share, every company and their dog will be barking to port their stuff to these platforms. Presently, these companies doesn't need Linux, but I think there'll come a time when they do. When that time comes, they'll have no choice but to submit and make their stuff Free, because they will want to get their stuff on Linux but will cop "hostility" if it's not Free.

    And rightly so. If they want to get onto this bandwagon and reap the rewards, then they need to be prepared to play by our rules or else be shoved off. They would fight if we tried to enter their proprietary software arena and not play by the rules, after all. They shouldn't be surprised that people using Free OSes want Free software to play movie files.

    Apple (and others like them) shouldn't be surprised if their current attitude puts them in a worse situation in the future.
  • Yes I'm going to feed the troll now. Yes I'm certain.

    The thing is, this isn't some highly-publicized event like the rollout of Win95. You'd have to have been in some backwaters part of the world to have missed Microsoft's media blitz on that one. Certainly, it would be hard to be on the net (reading /. is kinda hard without Internet access) and not realize that WinME and Win2k are busy trying to wreck the software world. The "to-do" list of XAnim isn't all that well-publicized. Most people check up on this one as often as they check up on, say, XV or linux-utils. It's news.
  • Not sure how that applies to BeOS. Elaborate.
  • xawtv.

    apt-get install xawtv

    quality is so-so (could be the card) but it will vidcap 12fps (avi format) on a 400mhz box, and display what appears to be full speed.

  • Quicktime codecs ? (Score:3)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @08:34AM (#649142)
    I read the webpage, but it doesn't say if it will finally support the Sorensen codec for quicktime or not (biggest reason to browse in windows besides windows media player).

    On a related note, does anybody know if it is at all possible (via wine or something) to listen to windows media player streams in Linux ? I find that honestly Realplayer streams blow chunks, and I would really love to listen tp WMP streams instead (www.com is a perfect example)
  • There's no reason to use xanim, except possibly for partial quicktime support.
    <p>
    MPEG is very well supported with the <a href="http://www.lokigames.com/development/smpeg.p hp3"
    SMPEG library</a>, thanks to loki<a
    There's even a plugin for xmms that works quite well.
    <p>
    AVI's are _fully_ support with <a href="http://divx.euro.ru/"> avifile</a>. I mean fullscreen, full frame rate support of ever avi filetype, including the DivX ;-) codec. This is a jaw-dropping piece of software.
    <p>
    There's even a project called <a href="http://xmps.sourceforge.net/">XMPS</a> which takes smpeg, avifile, and a couple other programs and puts them into one great piece of software.
    <p>
    So why do we need xanim?
  • xawtv does what you want and is actively maintained. Unfortunately it uses the crappy Xaw widgets for its controls, but hey it's free...

  • Re:why use xanim? (Score:4)

    by ywwg ( 20925 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @08:51AM (#649145) Homepage
    There's no reason to use xanim, except possibly for partial quicktime support.

    MPEG is very well supported with the SMPEG library [lokigames.com], thanks to loki. There's even a plugin for xmms that works quite well.

    AVI's are _fully_ support with avifile [divx.euro.ru]. I mean fullscreen, full frame rate support of ever avi filetype, including the DivX ;-) codec. This is a jaw-dropping piece of software.

    There's even a project called XMPS [sourceforge.net] which takes smpeg, avifile, and a couple other programs and puts them into one great piece of software.

    So why do we need xanim?

  • Actually, mp1e can capture from V4L to MPEG-1 in realtime on modest hardware!!! It's awesomely optimized.

  • quicktime (Score:3)

    by anethema ( 99553 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @08:42AM (#649147) Homepage
    Since Apple doesnt seem to be doing anything about the linux community anytime soon, i wonder if there are any plans in the works to make xanim able to play sorenson encoded quicktime files..
    all those pretty trailers like Final Fantasy [apple.com] (The Movie.) Its the best cg ive ever seen, but i cant watch it because xanim wont play it.
    And all those funny commercials on adcritic. is there maybe a way using windows dll's or something?

  • Re:XAnim is a bit obsolete ... try aviplay (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    DivX audio is (usually, read always) just mp3.

    Though, I believe it is technically possible to use just about any codec, it's an AVI file after all - just needs the player program to understand the codec in use.
  • I checked out XMPS [sourceforge.net], but it didn't have RTSP, RTP, or H.263, so I don't get the point behind your post.
  • oops, someone posted about this while i was writing

  • I've never gotten Xanim to work properly.
    One great alternative though, is xtheater, which can play DIVX AVI files, and last time I checked, Microsoft's ASF (Not reliably thought...)
    Check it out at http://xtheater.sourceforge.net.
  • Not Sorenson -- and Sorenson appears to be the Quicktime codec of choice everywhere on the Web.

    Marc Poplidec (sp?) says on the Xanim website that he asked Sorenson for specs so he could write a decoder. He routinely signs NDAs and implements binary-only Xanim modules for proprietary video formats. Give him a cross-compiler, and he'll compile it for whatever platform you run.

    Anyway, Sorenson said they'd love to, but that Apple forbade them from doing so. Hence, Apple are preventing you from viewing a large chunk of the video available on the Web, and Mark can't do anything about it, despite having the willing and the technical expertise.
    --

  • XAnim is a bit obsolete ... try aviplay (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04, 2000 @08:46AM (#649153)
    I suppose everybody here knows about aviplay (DivX is a fast way to make yourself popular) but although it uses .dll and other "non open source" resources who cares? After reading the XAnim page it's obvious that the player won't be GPL (at least since the beginning) and that it will keep using those precompiled modules to play certain formats. Latest aviplay (0.50) can even play DivX sound, and they are working hard on support encoding (not too reliable at this moment), soon we will all be able to backups our DVDs from Linux. If only we would have got a decent DVD player... how many nightmares the RIAA could have avoided ... Regards, - german PS: you can found aviplay at http://divx.euro.ru
  • This is just a wishlist. It is not an update. There are very many of these tiny obsolete little stories that no one cares about. Why did it make it to slashdot...?



    ------------------------
  • That was a whole lot of masturbating about free software but somehow I didn't see any real examples or facts. Like how most linux multimedia players bite my ass. Xanim can't even play standard mpegs from www.nineinchnails.net. Cinepak is a horrible old codec for quicktime, I'm not even sure who still uses it. All the other players might work, but just barely. I tried viewing a vcd mpeg at full screen and the framerate dropped almost 50%!
  • Huh? Are you looking for a (V4L) video capture app, or a media player?
  • This planned feature list is not 'news', but that's not my point. I last checked up on the latest version of xanim months ago because I was trying to find something that would play mpegs properly, and thought that a new version might be able to do so. The answer was no, but I did find this feature list, which does not appear to have changed much since I saw it then. This project appears to be quite sluggish.

    Once the new swiss-army-knife-xanim actually gets released, then let us know.

  • This has been on the website for months, I saw it back in July or August when I wanted to download the "old standby".

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

  • Re:not trivial (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @10:50AM (#649159)
    > 84% replied that UNIX - and Linux in particular - has no support for viewing pornography in a video form.

    Neither does Microsoft. A year or so ago, someone made a similar comment to me, so I took a fresh W98SE install into alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica and found most of the pr0n wouldn't play either.

    The problem with .AVI is that .AVI can mean any one of dozens of codecs. Off the top of my head, in loose chronological order, YUV9, IR32, IR42, IV5, I.263, MP4v2, MP4v3, DiVX...

    In order to pick up all the codecs, I had to spend a fair bit of time browsing web sites people had set up to solve this problem. (No, I don't consider the MSFT solution of "Install Media Player 7 and let it munge your system online, and rat back to Bill, Inc. what pr0n you're viewing" as a solution).

    The length of the alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica FAQ (and the effort to which people had gone through, both to "get" the codecs, many of which are, of course, no longer available even in closed-source form from Intel and what-not) tells me that "supporting .AVI" is as much of a problem for Micros~1 as it is for xanim.

    But it's also a testament to how much work people are willing to go through to get their pr0n.

    > Until Linux, BSD, etc. decide to support this vital part of the market, Microsoft will continue to dominate.

    Although the author of the comment said he was just kidding, and got modded "Funny", I think he's got a pretty good point.

    Look back - pr0n is what made the VCR popular. Bandwidth limitations for static images brought us .GIF and .JPG, and pr0n users were probably the ones who most needed the compression. Then comes .MPG, MPEG2, and a gazillion different codecs wrapped in .AVI.

    Look at DejaNews (no, they don't archive binaries, but they do archive alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.d.) and find out who the earliest adopters of MPEG4 video were. The pr0n groups appear to be several months ahead of the curve when it came to what-eventually-became-DiVX.

    Say what you will about the cheeziness of pr0n, but you can learn a lot about the state of the art in video compression just by looking at the file extensions of postings in alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.

  • Yup, streaming works fine in Media Player under wine. I use it to get my nightly Coast To Coast AM [coasttocoastam.com] fix. :)

    1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.

  • I've never been able to get xanim movies to play at more than a few frames per second without adjusting the speed manually (and that's inaccurate, to say the least). Has anyone else had this problem?

  • I have no ide how hard that would be, though. Somebody should reverse engineer those binary modules of xanim too. With access to the xanim source that should be easier.

  • >>Where could I get aviplay?

    http://www.google.com/search?q=aviplay
  • Erm, xanim was around well before SMPEG, and a long time before XMPS. The proper question is why did we need SMPEG and XMPS when all XAnim needed was cleaning up and extra modules?
  • *bangs head on wall* Sorry for that, I just tried freshmeat and gave up, sometimes I forget there are other places to look for linux software :)
  • gqcam is not just for the quickcam. The author says hes only tested it on his quickcam, but it works beautifully on many webcams including my creative labs webcam (USB version, running kernel 2.4.0-test7 last time i tried it)

    siri

  • Well, the Apple guy does have somewhat of a point..I've seen it happen time and time again where a company reaches out to test the waters with regards to Linux support, and they end up with nothing but heartache and tons of flammage because the more vocal parts of the 'community' didn't feel the company went far enough in supporting their open source ideals.
  • If only we would have got a decent DVD player... how many nightmares the RIAA could have avoided

    You're confusing one group of assholes with another. Its primarily the MPAA who is upset about the DVD copying issue... Of course, a number of the members of the RIAA are owned by the same large corporations that own a number of the members of the MPAA, so it all works out, I guess...

  • Aviplay is actually a Linux iomplementation of...welll....aviplay, a Windows multimedia API made by Microsoft. It uses small chunks of Windows based source code to provide the environment a Windows based codec expects, then provides a native Linux interface for players [most notably aviplay player] to plug into. It works surprisingly well.

    Here's the full list os supported codecs...note the Microsoft ones.

    ATI VCR-2
    Cinepak®
    DivX ;-)
    Indeo® Video 3.2, 4.1, 5.0
    Microsoft MPEG-4
    Motion JPEG ( based on rather slow libjpeg, so not yet very usable )
    Audio:
    DivX ;-) Audio
    Microsoft GSM 6.10
    IMA ADPCM
    MSN Audio
    MPEG Layer-1,2,3 Audio
    PCM

    On an unrelated note - RealPlayer for Linux is version 7 and won't play any of the recent media streams. Time to add Real to your Book of Grudges again.
  • Their solution is to say
    "we do not directly support linux, and therefore will not supply drivers for it; however have out interface spec - feel free to write your own (modulo NDA)."

    Personally I don't need the source code, and I don't care who compiled the executable. Only two things matter - does it seem to work and when it appears it doesn't is there someone interested in fixing it.
    If I had to tweak the source code myself, I'd be prepared to sign an NDA. There's nothing immoral about NDAs you know.

    Phil
  • XAnim is cool, but it's not the only game in town anymore. Check out Xtheater [sourceforge.net] for AVIs and ASFs, or MpegTV [mpegtv.com] for mpegs.

    Unfortunately, neither of these will play the stuff that I really want to see, like the Lord of the Rings Trailer or the D&D movie trailer. I'm forced to fall back to VMWare for that. Damn Quicktime...

  • There is a *huge* difference from having a desktop environment starting an application and a media player opening whatever file you can throw at it. A standard is needed, but right now it appears that it is more of a race of what is most popular and what gets most complete most quickly. Current, comprehensive Quicktime4 support is a lost cause for now, because of Sorenson, xanim is rather outdated now, SMPEG does a good job with MPG1, xmovie is nice, except for being a standalone player and not have its functionality through a lib. avifile is a really slick idea and can work quite well alongside smpeg to cover a great deal of file formats. I do not know much about livid, but I do know that real will probably stay in its current state for a long long time. Also promising to me is mpeglib (http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/) Supporting, apparently, mpg-1, mpg2, and divx...
    Some programs are attempting to bring together the functionality of whatever libraries are available for playback. Xtheater, xmps, LAMP are examples of projects in relatively similar states of development.. I suspect one of these may become a much bigger factor in the Linux community sometime soon.
  • For playing mpeg, I highly recommend getting smpeg from loki. www.lokigames.com [lokigames.com]

    It's much better than mpegtv, and it is GPLed.

  • > Why did it make it to slashdot...?

    Because it was the first movie|animation player for unix|linux and it was the only one available for free for a loooong period of time. It deserves our respect. I do install-it every time i find-it packaged in a distribution even if i use-it very seldom.
    An xanim has his strenghts - it's the only one that can play .fli|.flc files and old quicktime ones. And is available on most unices not only on linux and freebsd (like avifile).

    --
  • This is definitely a topic long since covered on Slashdot. I'm not sure about the info listed in the article though. Kinda sketchy. Can anyone elaborate on this?

    1. O P E N___S O U R C E___H U M O R [mikegallay.com]

  • Re:Quicktime codecs ? (Score:5)

    by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:24AM (#649176)
    Go to the unsupported xanim codecs page [pubnix.com] and read why you can not play sorenson video in linux. And send a polite mail to Sorenson asking them why they do not support anything else than mac and win.

    Maybe a gazilion polite e-mails from the /. ppl which will make their e-mail server crash'n'burn will be a good proof that un*x has a large enough market for their technology.

    --

  • avifile sucks (Score:3)

    by SpinyNorman ( 33776 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:25AM (#649177)
    avifile may read divx's, but it certainly doesn't work for all windows video CODECs. Have you ever tried getting it to use one other than those it comes bundled with - I hav't been able to get a single additional one to work - then all fail in different ways.

    Still, if you do want to use avifile, aviplay and XMPS are not the best players. Try LAMP [inria.fr] or XTheatre [sourceforge.net] instead.

    There are better options for MPEG also. SMPEG only works for MPEG-1 (as does mtvp). For MPEG-2, try xmovie [linuxave.net], xine [sourceforge.net], or the VideoLan [videolan.org] client.

    There's also at least 3 Open Source divx (i.e. MPEG-4) CODEC efforts that I'm aware of - I submitted the story yesterday, but it was rejected.

  • Re:why use xanim? (Score:4)

    by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:28AM (#649178) Homepage Journal
    Because it's open source. You've been reading Slashdot for long enough now to know that a particular CODEC or software need not be "stable" or "compatible with anything" or even "work". As long as it's Open Source, the greatest thing ever!

    Okay... I'm friggin tired of this attitude. Yes, it is *damn* important that it's Open Source. Did you ever think in your tiny little mind that there *might* just be something that you aren't getting about Open Source/Free Software?

    It's not the quality... for every quality comparison where Open Source wins (Apache vs. IIS 4.0, BSD Networking vs. the rest of the world), there is another where closed source wins (Any DTP program).

    The difference is that Open Source is a not a magic bullet to quality, but rather places the onus of quality on the userbase. It's not about free software, it's about the potential of Free software.

    Look around... not counting the people who use Linux on faith (either because it's trendy, or because someone they trust told them to try it), most users of Linux are people who make a living using computers. Most are people who have a serious personal investment in computing. And they choose Linux. It's hard to explain to someone who isn't a developer (heck, it takes time for even a computer developer) why XML is better than a binary file -- i.e., why open standards are better than propietary. Why the following is worse than 20k of code to read an XML file (pseudocode ahoy!):

    struct foo {
    int head,
    int torso,
    char lleg,
    char rleg
    }

    write(fp,foo,sizeof(foo))

    It's faster, smaller, leaves a smaller footprint... why not use it? For the exact same reason Linus refuses to change the /proc fs to binary read files. There is a philosophy inherent that is time tested, and experience shows that will result in more work at first, and less work later.

    And that's what both Open Source and Free Software are... philosophies that pay back later. Some of it pays off now (gimp, Konqueror, qmail), but it's the potential that, once it hits critical mass, will pay off in the future.

    --
    Evan "Typed hurriedly, not proofread, as I need to catch a train..." E.

  • Um, that's funny, I haven't visited the XAnim site since some time in '99, so this was news to me.

    I'm betting I'm not alone.
  • xanim doesn't fully support MPEG-1 - it's not buggy (not that xanim doesn't have bugs in other formats) but just that it only supports MPEG key frames, not intermediate ones.

    Try mtv, smpeg, xmovie, LAMP..

    If you want decent fullscreen support on a slower speed machine (as you would get in Windows), then you need XFree 4.0 with the Xv extension and a player that supports it. Xv supports shared memory transfer of YUV images (MPEG decoder output) from user space directly to the graphics card memory, and uses the graphics card's hardware YUV-to-RGB conversion and scaling support.

    BTW, there's only a few cards (such as Matrox g400) that have Xv driver support yet.

    If you don't have Xv support, then second best would be a player like LAMP that supports DGA (direct video memory access under XFree).

    xmovie [linuxave.net]

    LAMP [inria.fr]

  • Erm... (Score:1)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    MTV will play full-screen and only quits after a little bit if you don't pay for it. The command line tool (mtvplay, IIRC) isn't restricted, but doesn't have nice controls (just plays.)
  • Video for linux is one of the many things that isnt up to par (among the others is gaming stuff). I've been using mpeg tv, which honestly is just awful. The gui version doesnt work at all, and the command line version is desynced completely. Plus, its proprietory. If xanim can get those last modules opensourced, I know i'll be a hooked user.
  • This is a application where users need to show incoming video (NTSC) off a bttv card. Basically realtime video in an Xwindow...plus controls to adjust contrast, etc. and (optionally) save the stream to a video file (format somewhat irrevelant, no audio required for now, maybe later).

    I was getting ready to poke at some of the apps I saw over at Building #3, but thought I'd ask here, since a similar topic is up. As I recall, most of the apps to do this are somewhat primitive, grainy, unreliable, and don't have much of any controls.

    The gqcam application is very cool, but is only for the qcam. I'm almost thinking about trying to make something similar to that for bttv, presumably using the V4L api.

    BTW, if anyone sees this and knows something about the S-video inputs on many bttv cards (what they can/can't do -- typical resolution, etc) please enlighten me.

    T-again.



  • ... and found most of the pr0n wouldn't play either.

    And:

    But it's also a testament to how much work people are willing to go through to get their pr0n.

    I notice this spelling of porn a lot... why? You don't appear to be a person cursed with the sheeple-like need to phrase everything in "l33t-speak," so I am guessing that this spelling serves some purpose.

    Would you please fill in this poor un-initiated Slashdotter?

    :-)
  • > Until Linux supports these formats, its got a disadvantage in the p0rn market.

    That's 'pr0n'. Just a heads up.
  • It doesn't have to grab every frame. Most of the frames will be redundant.

    I'm guessing if I can get more than 5 fps they will be happy.

    Might need to pause and slew back through the actual captured frames on-the-fly, maybe 5 minutes worth.

    Another poster in this thread mentioned gqcam working with devices other than the quickcam, maybe it will work with bttv?

  • Doh! linking /dev/video1 (where my bt848 board is) to /dev/video locks gqcam after several seconds.

    The s/w does detect the device info properly, though.

    ---
    S.D.

  • this is not a webcam though...it's a ntsc source.

    I think creative bought the quickcam a year or two ago, so the usb is basically the same guts as a quickcam.

    gqcam locks up if i have it use the bttv848 board, unfortunately...but it does report it properly before locking :-)

  • What, I don't count? Drat! :)

    Anyhow, user numbers shouldn't count for anyone who was on slashdot before we had them, and mholve and I both fall in that category...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • ...When Soccer Mom Jane and Joe Six-Pack have web enabled pads (running Linux) on the back of the mini-van's bucket seats (for the kids, of course) no one is going to care one way or the other what the source code's clickthrough says.

    Come to think about it, what about the code in the car you drive? Aren't you 'upset' that it too isn't open source?
  • Avifile does almost everything that windows media player does. It's excellent. Have a look at it here: http://divx.euro.ru
  • Here is the address of the head of sales at Sorenson.

    Karen Nickolaisen
    Director of Sales
    Sorenson Media, Inc.
    4393 South Riverboat Road, Suite 300,
    Salt Lake City, UT 84123

    Write to her in your own fair hand on superior note paper and ever so politely ask when a QuickTime 4 plugin for Netscape running on Linux is coming out.

    Also you might care to offer $X for the module.

    For me:

    1. $10 = Instant Purchase
    2. $20 = Almost Certainly
    3. $50 = Careful Consideration
    4. $100 = No thanks
    Message to CmdrTaco: How about setting up one of your online polls for this?
  • I agree wholeheartedly. Below is the email that I just sent to Sorenson. Let's all be at least as polite as I tried to be.

    Dear Sir / Madam

    Today, many video clips are powered by the Sorenson codec. I notice that there are decoders / viewers for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, yet there are none for GNU/Linux and UNIX in general.

    There is a UNIX video stream player called 'Xanim', found at http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/ . This program has the ability to plugin binary decoder modules, to allow playback of many different codecs. I note that the Sorenson codec is not among them.

    Because of Xanim's ability to accept binary modules, the source code to your codec does not need to be revealed to anyone. Please consider supporting the Linux and UNIX communities by providing a module for Xanim. We all look forward to watching videos powered by Sorenson!

    Regards

    My name here

    The last thing we need is them refusing, on account of rude people emailing them...


    _______________________________________

    Is that an African or European swallow?

  • Looks like you morons got a beowolf cluster of first posts going
  • It does already! Apple has the quicktime codecs released and are cross-OS, so they work as long as you have a(n) i386, Alpha, or PPC. On a Debian system, you can install the xanim-modules package to get these, as well as AVI codecs.

    This came from dpkg -p xanim; I don't actually use it, so this may not work so well. I don't know.
  • Anonymous cowards aren't supposed to have sigs... no wait a minute... huh?



    ------------------------

  • Re:Quicktime codecs ? (Score:3)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Saturday November 04, 2000 @09:40AM (#649197)
    WMP plays local files nicely on recent Wine versions, and there are reports that streaming works also (haven't tried it myself).

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