Tag Archives: Multimedia

Switching from mp3 to ogg

When it comes to multimedia software most Linux distributions have one thing in common: no proprietary codecs – and this might include MP3 playback. I have no deeper insights in the license terms of the MP3 codec, but there is a whole website about it by THOMPSON, the company claiming to control MP3 licensing: mp3licensing.com. There are other proprietary codecs as well, i.e. “aac” which I think is the default file format for Apple’s iTunes and devices by Nokia and Sony. Wouldn’t it be nice to not care about this crap? The open source alternative is “ogg vorbis“, providing great quality audio files and high compression at the same time. So, how can you switch from mp3 to ogg?

If you already have a large collection of MP3 files I guess it wouldn’t make any sense converting them to OGG (though possible). Just keep them as they are. But you could start ripping your new CDs to OGG and go on with this format.

If you’re interested http://www.vorbis.com/ would be a good starting point.
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Debian with lame, mencoder, transcode, xvid & dvd::rip

Debian has one of the largest software repositories around but also has a very strict policy (which I respect) when it comes to legal stuff concerning free software or copyrights. I guess this is the reason why some multimedia software packages are missing. If you stick with Debian you have to install them manually, or – if you want the easy way – you could of course add some third party respositories or change for example to Ubuntu which doesn’t seem to share Debian’s concerns. As I’m running sidux (which is based on Debian Sid) I wanted to go for the manual installation (I don’t like to add repositories other than Debian’s). Debian comes with an MPlayer package but it lacks menconder. If you need menconder you’ll have to install from sources. lame, transcode, xvid and dvd::rip are not part of Debian repositories at all, so we’ll have to install them from sources, too. In this HOWTO I’ll explain how this worked for me (running sidux on amd64). I guess it should be similar to Debian testing or even stable.

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Multimedia in SUSE 10.1

As for all major Linux distributions SUSE comes with almost no support for multimedia. At least mp3 playback is possible via Real Player or amaroK if you install “amarok-helix” and choose it as playback engine for amaroK. If mp3 support is all you want, you’re all set! But I like to go a little further here.

Almost all you need for this purpose: Packman has it! Just add this repository to smart. From there on are two ways. If you added Packman with the default settings you will get a bunch of new packages the next time you do a “smart update/upgrade” replacing the one’s from SUSE by Packman’s. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I like to stay closer with SUSE. So, when adding the Packman repository to smart I selected “-10″ as priority. This way, I can manually choose which packages from Packman I like to install.

If you followed the “-10 priority”-part you now need to install the packages manually. Open the smart-gui and search for the following packages and mark them for installation/removal (packages by Packman have “pm” in their name):
INSTALL:

  • libxine1 (from Packman)
  • xine-ui (from Packman)
  • xine-skins (from Packman)
  • speex (for amd64: both, the x86_64 and i686 from Packman)
  • xmms (from Packman)
  • xmms-lib (from Packman)
  • faad2-xmms-plugin (from Packman)
  • xmms-mac (from Packman)
  • xmms-shn (from Packman)

REMOVE:

  • speex-32bit (from SUSE)
  • xmms-plugins (from SUSE)

After those packages and their dependencies are installed you should be able to listen to mp3′s and watch most movie formats – with the exception of DVDs… I’ll cover that later, as this is a little tricky and in some countries even not legal.