RH10 multimedia support

Joseph Phillips jphillips at amphus.com
Fri Sep 5 22:03:14 UTC 2003


Hopefully now that Red Hat has cleared up the issue between their enterprise
line and their "community" product, they will reintroduce more
out-of-the-box multimedia support in their community line (RH10 for
example).

For example, I hope Red Hat 10 includes a good movie player -- like Totem
from Gnome 2.4.

One of the worst experiences for me was trying to setup mplayer on RH9. It
still doesn't work right. I get skins errors, and the codecs didn't get
setup right, and I had lib problems when compiling from source. Just a plain
pain in the butt.

In RH10, here's what I'd hope for--a pre-packaged movie player that works
perfectly on it's own. And, an unofficial RPM that automatically installs
all of the codecs that I could ever possibly want.

Imagine that. If all I had to do was "rpm -ivh codecs.rpm" and my movie
player was up and running with support for all the formats that I could ever
want to play.

Anyway, I hope RH addresses more multimedia issues in RH10. I was able to
get xmms working well with the mp3 RPM from gurulabs, so I'm happy about
that. But the xmms front-end could use a bit of work in my opinion. Maybe it
needs to be HIG-ified or something, but it's not a really intuitive
interface if you ask me.

It's the same issue with Java and flash player for the browser. I'm not shy
of the console, but still I'd prefer an easier way to get plugins installed.
Like the way IE does it for example: if you go to a site that has java or
flash, a little pop-up comes up and prompts you to automatically install the
software. I don't see why Red Hat can't accomplish this with the browsers
they bundle in their distribution (epiphany, galeon, konqueror, mozilla).





More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list