“Not long ago, a digital photo was a rarity, and even if you had
a camera that could take them, you couldn’t fit many on your hard
drive. It’s a similar story with music.“These days, it’s almost impossible to believe that the original
MP3 player, Audio Highway’s Listen Up from 1997, had a capacity of
32MB, which could hold about an album’s worth of audio with a low
enough compression ratio. Most of our TuxRadar podcasts are larger
than that, and a typical broadband connection can grab the data in
seconds.“Digital video has become ubiquitous too. Since most camera
devices have a video mode, you may be one of the many who like to
take impromptu videos of events you find yourself in. The net
result is a mess of files, formats and software sitting on your
hard drive.“But Linux, and open source, is a free-flowing movement, and
this means we can now take advantage of some of the best tools,
transcoders and apps to help us do something with those files.”