As stated in previous posts, I am gradually moving my home desktop from Windows to Linux. I am running two desktops and laptop in parallel right now and have most critical applications on the two desktops. I am also trying out several distributions on a CF-28 Toughbook that I have. Trying to install and use Linux for a desktop OS has been a learning opportunity – here is what I have found so far:
Setting up multimedia support in Linux is a real issue.
Some Linux distributions that want to stay pure to the open source, non-proprietary and free philosophy do not come configured to play audio, video or DVDs – a lot of this really has nothing to do with technical limitations and is not really a weakness in Linux but is due to some distros not wanting to sell out to or get involved in licensing and software patent issues of companies or research organizations. The whole industry is in quite a mess because of all these software patents and proprietary closed source audio, video and codec formats and most of it boils down to corporations or organizations trying to protect content or enhance profits. Unfortunately, because of the current formats that a lot of the web, audio, and video content use, you must have some of these proprietary or licensed items installed to have a “useful” desktop. I realize that there are certain sites, especially those selling online videos that are using some type of DRM that are likely to never work on Linux, but I am just talking about getting normal audio and video formats to operate so that you can access 90% of what is out there. There are ways to get most types of audio, video and DVD content to play but it involves a few extra steps. I have also found other challenges in getting video and audio content to play consistently from various web sites – some web sites seem to encode their audio or video links in such a way that some of the video players and/or browser plugins available in Linux will not work. I have had a real challenge getting the following sites to work:
- CBC radio streaming links at http://www.cbc.ca/radio
- Viewing movie trailers at http://winnipegmovies.com
It seems like I can get one or the other working but very rarely both with the same media player and plugins. One of the most popular Linux media players, Mplayer, will not work with CBC even though they say it should on their site – it appears to start loading the stream but then times out with a “stopped” message and never starts playing the audio. I even tried this with Crossover Office standard and Microsoft’s Media Player 6.0 that it installs with plugins and it seems to have the same issue. Other Linux media players like Xine and VLC seem to work so I finally manged to find a couple combinations that would work but some of the plugins that do work lack the nice embedded control features (for volume, etc.). I also found that all browsers you have installed want to use the same set of plugins so you cannot install different browsers as a workaround to get different multimedia content to play properly. Again, this is not totally a fault of Linux but sometimes is the result of whoever is putting up the content taking the easy way out by only wanting to have a single format or not checking to make sure what they are streaming is encoded in the best way. Some of the better audio or video streaming sites give you a choice so you can choose the type of audio or video format to play and I hope as Mac and Linux become more popular this becomes more common.
Keep checking back – I will try and describe other issues I am running into as I continue to experiment with Linux on the desktop.
