Re: Helix Player

[rct@gherkin.frus.com (Bob Tracy)]

Recently I've been wondering about the feasibility of producing a
working Helix Player port for the Alpha.  Falk Hueffner suggested
I should have a look at MPlayer.  What I've discovered isn't promising.
There are no Debian packages, and probably won't be due to both the
non-free nature of several needed components and the question of
software patents.  Regardless of the politics, the bottom line is
that any useful (non-trivial) media player is going to have to have
Alpha-specific codecs available.  The MPlayer website has RealPlayer8
codecs available for the Alpha, but everything looks pretty x86-centric
otherwise.

So...  As things stand today I can almost build hxplay-1.0.7, but the
work left to do is non-trivial.  Before moving forward with this, I
wouldn't mind a few comments from those who have gone before: will the
finished product be able to do anything useful?  I haven't approached
the Helix Community yet about codecs for Alpha, but that would seem to
be a necessary step.

Alternatively, does anyone have a media player for the Alpha that can
handle streaming audio in at least one of the semi-modern formats
(RealAudio, Windows Media Audio)?  I'm not worried about video at this
stage.

-- 
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Bob Tracy                   Beware the fire-and-forget weapon that
rct@frus.com                forgets who fired it.   --Bill Kennedy
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