"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."
