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

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

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