Re: OfB.biz: Real Networks Announces New Media Player Project

On Thursday 07 August 2003 2:43 am, Timothy R. Butler wrote:
> > Also, I don't think anything you said justifies the statement that Linux
> > is lagging behind in the video player area. Although it might justify my
> > statement that you haven't actually done any research on MPlayer.
>
>   Sure I have... I've used it quite a bit, although I got tired of fighting
> with it. I did get a DVD playing, IIRC albeit without menu functionality (I
> can't recall if MPlayer is suppose to support that or not, at any rate, I
> moved on to xine after awhile).

It isn't, yet. But other than that it works perfectly. It even plays region 4 
DVDs on my region 2 RPC-2 drive.

>   KMPlayer looks promising, but didn't work well when I tested it
> (January).

It works OK now, and problems can be fixed more easily than writing a whole 
new player

>   At any rate, Real's work could allow distros to ship with RealMedia
> support in the box... MPlayer can't do that (legally). I'm also guessing,
> although I could be wrong, that KMPlayer/MPlayer doesn't have full
> RealMedia support for things like menus, etc.

True, although they could just change the license on the codecs to allow 
unlimited redistribution, and let the MPlayer guys get on with it. Or write 
Linux codecs, and put appropriate licenses on those. But then, the Windows 
codecs are working fine, so I don't see that that's a worthwhile use of 
resources.

>   At any rate, I think getting the "real thing," ahem, is still better than
> getting Windows libraries to work in GNU/Linux.

I don't see that it makes any difference, as long as it works (which it does, 
flawlessly). The code is still x86, it's not like you have to do any hardware 
emulation.

-- 
Dan.

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