On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 07:10:42AM -0500, Robert Tilley wrote: > What factor allows Windows, a bloated and buggy product, to play video > effortlessly as compared to Linux? I actually prefer to view some of my > favorite music videos under Windows because the playback is much smoother > and the sync'ing of the audio and video is much more exact. Simple. For over five years, hardware manufacturers have had the chance to fine-tune and optimize their graphics drivers. The drivers are developed _before_ the hardware ships (because without drivers you cannot sell it) and Linux developers typically don't care so much about high-end graphics optimization (or the XFree86 drivers would be better). > Do I need to ditch KDE and use a lightweight wm for for multimedia? I > would use noatun (KDE Multimedia Player) but that program doesn't allow > display-window size-changing. No. It's not a matter of the window environment, it's a matter of a) twisting XFree86 to do what it was never meant to do - high performance graphics b) spend endless time on optimizing every bit movement in a graphics driver and the API c) actually HAVING an API for all these things. Re. c): Windows has had DirectX for a long time. Friends tell me it sucks dead hamsters through straws in terms of being easy to program and stable (both in terms of API changes, and in terms of crashing) - BUT it is available, fairly well documented, and it has the marketing power of Microsoft behind it, which can force it down all users' throats no matter what kind of shitty crap it is. So, if you want to do multimedia, the 'easiest' choice is just to write a DirectX module, and bang! all apps can use your file format, codec, or whatever. In Linux, there is (not yet) such a thing. There is avifile, which wraps a layer around Windows DLLs to be able to (very well!) play DivX AVIs, WMV, ASF, etc. There is mplayer, which can additionally play MPEG files. There are several other programs for playing other media files. But there is no 'all around' media player application. And in the Linux world, this usually means that there is no need for such an app, otherwise somebody would have developed it. -- Jens Benecke ········ http://www.hitchhikers.de/ - Europas Mitfahrzentrale Crypto regulations will only hinder criminals who obey the law.
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