[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
“GNU/Linux has never been short of audio and video
players, but they live in a world of multiple codecs, chief culprit
amongst them being MP3, AAC, WMA and (Adobe) Flash. I say
“culprits” because they are not free and open codecs. They are
encumbered by patents; most websites with embedded audio/video use
them and most of the people who view them are also using other
patented software: Windows. GNU/Linux is a good alternative and all
distros come bundled with free and open multimedia alternatives
too: Ogg. You would not be surprised that these players can handle
Ogg but what if I told you that Mozilla’s Firefox browser could not
only handle this codec but could be used also to transcode videos
to that format? Interested? Read on. Firefox, thy name is versatile“One of the constant bugbears about viewing multimedia content
on the web is the need for third-party plugins, especially for
proprietary plugins like (Adobe) Flash. The free software community
has responded with a non-patent version called Gnash, with limited
success. It’s still a plugin though, free or not; besides, the
number of websites hosting Ogg as the basis for their streaming
software can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. It
goes without saying that the Ogg codec has the unconditional
support of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation
— but wanting doesn’t get. For example, I own an ageing
iRiver MP3 player. It is one of the few that also supports Ogg but
that seems a little superfluous given that so few sites offer
it.”