Play MPEG Movies Under LinuxPPC

Jason Haas writes: "We now have instructions for playing MPEG movies under LinuxPPC, and they're posted on our Web site on this page. Sam Lantinga of Loki Software wrote a number of the utilities we use (thanks!), along with one by Jan Hubicka. Happily, they're all in RPM format, which shouldn't be a problem for anyone to handle. We also have instructions for editing Netscape's setup to automagically play MPEGs when they're downloaded. It is most cool to see and hear your LinuxPPC box playing a movie." Maybe I can find a nice cheap green iMac to try this on.

Jason Haas

Glad to see Jason is back on his feet. :) After the status updates on his progress stopped, I started wondering what was happening. Welcome back, Jason! :)

xanim?

Why couldn't they use xanim? I realize some of the proprietary codecs only come in binary form but my understanding was that MPEG was unencumbered...

Re:the Ninjas Have Won!

Two answers to your delema:

#1: If you mean "Why would you run Linux instead of MacOS?" Well, a myriad of reasons actually. MacOS is rather nice in many respects, but programing on it ain't the best experience in the world. (Yes, I've done it.) Also, it plays very well with MacOS (as in can be put on any partition regardless of position and won't (read: won't unless you screw it up) ruin your HFS/HFS+ partitions, so there's no need to ditch MacOS.

#2: If you mean "Why would you run Linux on PPC instead of Linux on Intel?" Well, besides the hardware being more expencive... Linux on PPC is the easiest install/maintain that *I've* ever done. I was shocked at how much of a pain in the arse it was to install on an x86 compared to the absolute breese on PPC. Some of this is starting to go away though, ie LILO cylender restriction gone by-by, so this might not be the case in another year or so. But anyway, that's a good reason.

Yummy, pancakes.

Re:xanim?

I don't know about playing xanim on linuxPPC, but on my 500 mhz, AMD K6-2, with 128 megs of RAM, mpeg playback under xanim is really crappy. smpeg is *much* better.

Adam

Happily RPM?!?

Happily, they're all in RPM format

I for one, can't understand this favoring of a distro's packetmanager instead of just plain old .tar.gz source code.

Even if it needs to be a binary package, then USE THE STANDARD TOOLS(tar + gzip) so people that don't want to infest their system have a chance.

-H

Re:Another solution

this is a x86-only binary solution, since LinuxPPC isn't for x86, you can't run mtv or mtvp on LinuxPPC

Re:Why not QuickTime?

xanim can already play quicktime's file and stream format, and most of the codecs through cinepak. Unfortunately, almost all quicktime content on the net now uses the sorenson codec, which is patent-encumbered and so can't legally be implemented.