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Re: [tlug] FC5 Sucks: firewire drive/videos



On 09/11/06, Al Hoang <hoanga@example.com> wrote:

        I'm really curious what Josh means by Ubuntu's poor multimedia support.
Josh?

I am really curious about how I have been so badly mis-quoted in this thread. ;)

Here's what I said in the beginning:

On 08/11/06, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

On 07/11/06, Darren Cook <darren@example.com> wrote:

> Q3: Which distributions work well for multimedia, out of the box?

Gentoo. Debian. Not Ubuntu.

Note that I am simply answering the "out of the box" question. I knew that Ubuntu had very specifically disabled encrypted DVD playback out of the box, which is why I said "not Ubuntu". Nowhere did I suggest that Ubuntu has "poor multimedia support".

What I did not realise is that Debian is the same way. Sorry for that.

        Gentoo makes it easier to avoid searching the web since there is a
portage package that can get you up and running properly but I hardly
believe it's as simple as just emerge <mplayer and friends> without a *little*
bit of tweaking.

Sure it is.

1. emerge --sync if necessary
2. emerge <some multimedia package>
3. Wait for the download of tarball and dependencies
4. Wait for compile (Even on a Quad Xeon processor with huge honking fast drives
   it's going to 'take some time')
5. Forget that you want version X which is masked so you need to unmask it.
6. Wow, other packages want to be unmasked because you want version X
7. emerge --unemerge
8. Oops USE options....  repeat steps 3-7
9. Repeat steps 3-8 until you actually have the right version.
10. Hey that wasn't so bad

A simple "emerge mplayer" will give you mplayer with almost all the codecs you need. It certainly supports encrypted DVD and DViX/XViD. Sure, tweaking of USE flags is required if you want an Emacs-like build of mplayer, but the standard one will get you there.

-Josh


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