Go Open - SA Open Source TV Show

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> Finally finished downloading them, all 13 and 1.2GBytes worth of shows.  
> I find it somewhat ironic that I haven't been able to watch them under 
> Linux;  I only been able to watch them using QuickTime on my Win98 machine.
> 
> Is there an "open" way to watch these episodes?  I can see the video in 
> Ubuntu using Totem, but I have yet to be able to get any sounds from 
> these mpeg4 under Linux, after various tries with various applications.

I don't know what applications you have tried, but it sounds like a missing 
codec issue.  It sounds like the codecs you need are non-free codecs which are 
not installed on your GNU/Linux machine.  Mplayer and Xine for instance, will 
play a variety of non-free media files because they are commonly used with the 
non-free codecs installed on Microsoft Windows or MacOS.  This, of course, is 
a showstopper problem if you don't want non-free software or if you're running 
GNU/Linux on an unpopular architecture because the codecs will not run 
anywhere but the architectures where the proprietors compiled them.

Another method would be to create new files by transcoding the movies to Ogg 
Theora+Vorbis files.  Such files will play on any platform, under any OS, and 
on any architecture with a wide variety of player programs (including VideoLAN 
Client which, if used without the non-free codecs, is free software and 
available on a lot of different OSes).  Unfortunately, this is bound to be a 
lossy conversion.  Far better would be to go back to the master recordings and 
produce Ogg Theora+Vorbis files from them.