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Bob attempts to make multimedia stuff work.

Linux has all kinds of multimedia abilities, it’s had them for years. The trick is to get it all working. My install of Fedora Core comes with a variety of media related goodies: a CD audio player, something called the Helix Player, the Totem Movie Player, the Rhythmbox Music Player, and a simple CD audio extractor called Sound Juicer.

As I mentioned a couple of times before, a typical install of Linux can’t play things like MP3s out of the box. This isn’t for any technical reason, it is because of patents that many distributors of Linux, including Red Hat, won’t ante up for. Not only does this make good business sense if you are giving away a free operating system, it is also more compatible with the spirit of the GNU Public Licence that Linux is released under. The GPL is all about sharing stuff freely. Software patents are not. I’m not all hard core about the GPL but I understand why Linux distributors heed its wisdom. Their integrity will only inconvenience me temporarily.

Dan tells me the Livna library will solve my multimedia problems. Livna is a third party software library, built to serve Fedora Core Linux, but not affiliated with Red Hat in any official way. Hosted in a country where scary U.S. patents have no teeth, Livna is a kind of a Skunk Works for Fedora Core, hosting all of the dodgy, hush-hush stuff.

Adding Livna support to Fedora Core 5 is easy. You need only to download and install their configuration package. It adds itself to the list of software repositories so the powerful yum command can download Livna packages too. You can even read their news and browse their repository to get a better idea of what they offer and what the things are called.

Easy MP3 Playback in Fedora Core

There are a bunch of programs in my install of Linux that can play MP3s when properly configured, but they all seem so dreadfully complicated. Helix looks okay and so does Rhythmbox, but both seem to suffer from the big fat user interface problem that many Gnome apps suffer from. There are days I wonder if all the Gnome developers are going blind. I want something less… big.

While browsing the Livna repository I find something I recognise: an install package called ‘xmms-shn’. I’ll bet this is the X MultiMedia System, built and configured for Fedora Core 5! XMMS is the program I use on the jukebox machine at work and it works well. It’s an old program designed to look like Winamp 2. It used to be the default music player in Red Hat distros until newer stuff replaced it. Simple, unobtrusive and stable — it’s exactly what I need. I also find a file called xmms-mp3, the MP3 plugin for it.

Installing XMMS with MP3 support is really easy now that the Livna repositories are attached:

yum install xmms

and then

yum install xmms-mp3

I cue up a list of tunes from the fileserver… yep, I’ve got an audio player. It even calls itself the ‘Audio Player’ in the Applications menu. It plays wavs, CDs, MP3s, even my two Ogg files. Nice.

Getting Video to Work in Fedora Core

I’m told that one of the easiest ways to get video to work involves something called ‘GStreamer’. GStreamer is a multimedia framework media playback programs can use to do their decoding. This is basically what Windows does and it makes sense: have one program take care of all the audio and video codecs so you don’t have to download special plugins for each player you want to use. The Rhythmbox audio player is a GStreamer app, as is the Totem video player.

Fedora Core 5 comes with GStreamer already installed. All you have to do is put in the naughty bits (like Quicktime, Realmedia, MP3, DivX, etc…) and then you can watch video. The instructions on their site are pretty simple once you realise that the whole keyring thing is optional. To get the goods, simply copy their three .repo files into your /etc/yum.repos.d directory. I think this adds them to your repository list. Then issue the command:

yum install gstreamer-universe

As near as I can tell, this downloads every codec and plugin they’ve got. Whatever it did, it worked. Totem gained the ability to play all but one of my videos (and I think that one is corrupted in some way).

Just for good measure I also install nVidia’s official binary driver, as I’ve read in a couple of places that it might improve video playback under certain conditions.

yum install kmod-nvidia

By putting in this driver I apparently have also gained full GLX 3D support, though I honestly haven’t tried to use it because I don’t play all that many games.

Using Bittorrent in Fedora Core

There’s little point in having all this media playback ability unless you have the ability to… uhh… get more media. For this, every computer user needs a Bittorrent client and a couple of good tracker sites. Luckily, Azureus is available for Linux. Azureus is one of the most popular bittorrent clients on the net and because it is based on Java it is available for Linux too.

At first, installing it seems easy enough:

yum install azureus

Azureus is based on the Java programming language which Linux doesn’t normally come with support for, but Yum figures it out and puts in a Java Virtual Machine for me. But after a while of use it became apparent that Azureus is performing very poorly, not at all like the Windows version. This is odd as Java code should be the same and work the same on any platform. My current thinking is that the free JVM isn’t up to snuff. This is probably resolvable by simply using the proper Sun Java Virtual Machine. Seems like work. Here’s a better idea:

yum install bittorrent-gui

The -gui part on the end is important. If you don’t put it on (like I did on my first try) all you get is the command-line version of Bittorrent, which I can’t figure out how to use. Add it and you get the official graphical Bittorrent client from Bittorrent.com, the inventors of the protocol. It’s not nearly as fancy as Azureus, but it works well enough to keep me in torrents, at least until such time as I can be bothered to get Azureus working properly.

It’s Not for the Lazy…

But no one ever said freedom would be easy. Like any OS, configuring a Linux system for personal use is not for an amateur, but any Windows user with a bit of skill should be able to switch and enjoy similar functionality. I was able to. Each of my desktop software requirements was met, even if it took a bit of hackage. Linux even allows me to keep my old copy of Windows, should I get the urge for a game or something. Of course, one day all PC games will ship with a Linux version. . .

I figure there are a lot of Windows hackers out there who need to ask themselves some fundamental questions about where they want to go tomorrow. Is it down the path Microsoft has laid out for you? Such is an increasingly isolated road of advertising, proprietary lock-ins and industry control. If left in the hands of these guys your personal computer will become no better than a television. And what have they really done for you lately? They have an aptitude for making you pay money for the latest, greatest version of their product and yet they have consistently missed everything that has really changed computing for the better. World Wide Web? Missed it. Blogs? Missed those too. Instant messaging? Forums? Wikis? Music? Video? All the best applications in computing didn’t come from Microsoft, it came from people who gave it away without restrictions. That’s all I’m seeing from Microsoft these days — restrictions. It’s not the way forward anymore. Maybe it never was.

Because of my job I’ll still have to know about Microsoft’s products and all their many faults. Users of Windows can live in fear of things like Windows Genuine Advantage, Product Activation, Digital Rights Management, spyware, viruses, and whatever is the latest crazy exploit this week. They’ll pay me to fix it for them and I will happily, just with a new perspective.

I know now that such things aren’t my problem anymore. I have switched to Linux.