Re: F18 livecd can't play wma files, and no mplayer
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 15:48:50 -0400,
Fernando Cassia <fcassia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I know Rick. I've found the hard way that Fedora's media players,
as shipped with the OS, are basically useless for playing any media
you find on the Net, no mp3 playback, no wma audio playback, can't
even play back *.mp4 (MPEG 4 layer 10, aka H.264) files downloaded
from Youtube via keepvid.com...
Youtube provides webm which is playable with packages available in Fedora.
Conferences related to free software also often provide recorded talks
in formats that are not patent encumbered.
And common media players like MPlayer or VLC do not come in
'statically linked' versions that one can just download as a single
file and run, while booted off a LiveCD... (yes, one can 'yum install
mplayer' but it's painfully slow and the app is obviously gone at the
next reboot).
You pretty much need just as much stuff if not more by downloading
a static archive. It will just be in one file instead of several. It may
be that the install goes slower since seeks on optical media are very slow.
Also note it is pretty easy to use livecd-creator to make respins that
include stuff from rpmfusion.
PS: For the curious, I have tons of radio shows recorded in DVD-R in
low-bitrate, mono .wma files, files often being 100MB+ in size each
and containing four hours of audio.... which I often want to cut in
tiny snippets, for which I use the Linux freeware (not FOSS, but
freeware) http://www.radioactivepages.com/asfbin.aspx from the command
line. But in order to be able to cut it, first I need to be able to
hear the files to find cut points.
There are some free (and weapons grade) voice audio encoders that need
around 1400 bps which sounds like it would result in significantly
smaller files. One was covered by a talk at LCA 2012.