Video files debugging....

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Sat, 2005-04-16 at 10:27 +0200, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> Ahhh, very interesting, thanks for that.
> 
> I draw 3 conclusions... :
> 
> 1) When you install the w32codec from Synaptic, you don't really know
> whether Totem uses them or not.
> 
> 2) The w32codec are better than they originally "appeared"...sicne they
> weren't actually used !
> 
> 3) The ffmpeg/free codec are improving (CVS)
> 
> 
> Point 1) is worrying, as it means that when you "install" the
> w32codec... they are not really being used by Totem. 
> But since the w32codecs are not in trhe Ubuntu repositories, you can't
> possibly complain if they aren't installed properly in the first place.
> So we should move them to the Multiverse so that we can ensure that all
> the "priorities" are set in such a wa yas to make SURE, that the
> x32codec will ACTUALLY be used to playback.
Yes and No. w32codecs package *is* installed properly.  The thing is
that MPlayer and Xine (and almost all the other open source media
players even on Windows) favours the open source way over any other
method, hence the use of FFMPEG's ffwma decoder instead of the
wmadmo.dll from w32codecs.  As I said before, FFMPEG is getting really
good now and the CVS version is working flawlessly with WMA streams.
Once the next version of FFMPEG released and followed by a release from
Xine (or if Xine released a version that include the new ffwma code)
Totem will work out of the box with WMA.

Another point is that the open source codecs are usually better AND
faster than the closed source one. And not even that, but they compile
and run on almost any platform (Linux users on a SPARC machines, for
example, can't play any WMV file that is encoded with WMV3 (Microsoft
calls it Windows Media Video 9) since the only available decoders are
the Win32 DLL for x86 and the QuickTime plug-ins for PowerPC processor
(for Mac OS X)).

> Points 2) and 3) are very encouraging, it means that video playback is
> currently not *that* bad, and that it is soon becoming better, once
> ffmpeg CVS becomes stable/released, and can be included in the default
> Ubuntu install. This will keep us going, until Gstreamer is mature
> enough to gives us this lovely unified/coherent multimedia framework for
> Gnome, that will make things simpler and easier for the end user.
Exactly! But remember there is one other problem: Patents.  Microsoft
(or any other company/party) may sue Ubuntu/FFMPEG/programmers if they
includes, say, ffwma decoder even that it's open source and doesn't
depend (or include) any copyrighted code from others. Why? Because they
might have a patent on the technology of decoding a stream of bytes that
we call Windows Media Audio (either version 1 or 2).

> This is all very encouraging to me :o)
> 
> 
> --
> Vince
> 
> 

Ziyad.