FreeOS.com: Somebody stop me!; choices for MPEG/VCD playback under Linux

Jan 01, 2001, 15:37 (2 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Rony Gabriel)

"Word had been going around that the special effects for Titanic were made on a Linux cluster. In spite of this and all the spectacular stories we hear about Linux, I still couldn't see Jim Carrey yelling "Somebody stop me" on my machine. Well, this is not true anymore. Now, not only can I listen to Jim Carrey, I can also hear the dinosaurs stomping in my backyard! Video is very much alive and kicking on Linux. This article is a look at the video libraries and players available on Linux."

"1. Smpeg [http://www.lokigames.com/development/smpeg.php3]
Loki software is more famous for making Linux gaming a whole new experience. They have released the motion jpeg and mpeg players which they use in their software to the public domain (GPL). Smpeg is an mpeg player, which can do both audio and video playback. Smpeg is now part of the Red Hat distribution. It also supports fullscreen display using SDL."

"2. Avifile [http://divx.euro.ru/]
Mpeg4 Divx ;-) movies are of very high quality and more importantly, small size. But, there was no open source implementation available till now. Wine came to the rescue. What we have now, is a very good Divx ;-) and asf player for Linux based on Wine. It uses the Windows dll's to play the video. Audio is played separately. Try playing the Divx ;-) trailers available from http://divx.ctw.cc/. Requires SDL and Qt libraries."

Complete Story

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