Re: [tlug] WMP on Linux

[Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>]

On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 16:55, xian wrote:
> On Monday 05 May 2003 16:44, Jonathan Q wrote:
> > Haven't seen this on TLUG yet, so let's start the day with the
> > news that MS is having Windows Media for Linux development
> > done by a third party:
> >
> > http://www.osopinion.com/perl/printer/21371/
> >
> > Discuss amongst yourselves :-)
> >
> > J
> 
> The questions are: "Why?" and "Will anyone actually use it?"


I think the why question is simple to answer.  They are interested in
promoting their video formats as the standard.  As for whether anyone
will use it, I suspect some companies that require WMA support will
because its legal status is a bit clearer then mplayer which already
supports most formats.

>From their page
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/info.html

Supported input formats
+ASF/WMV/WMA format 
Supported video and audio codecs
+Windows Media Video v7 (WMV1), v8 (WMV2) and v9 (WMV3) used in .wmv files
+WMA (DivX Audio) v1, v2 (native codec)
+WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware audio, ACELP.net etc (using x86 DLLs)

If Microsoft doesn't open source it there will only be support for x86
GNU/linux so it would not seem to offer anything new for most users.

-- 
Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>