F18 livecd can't play wma files, and no mplayer

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Thu Apr 18 19:48:50 UTC 2013


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Rick Stevens <ricks at alldigital.com> wrote:
> Red Hat/Fedora play by USA
> laws and can't include things that have such issues. SuSE and several
> others based outside the USA bypass them regularly.

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...

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 might say "why don't you install the OS and be done with it?" and
you might have a point, but it's still a sad reality of the Linux
world that there's no "download and run" media player available on
Linux that doesn't need a ton of dependencies installed. Ironically,
on Windows the user can just go to any "portable apps" site and
download a single .exe file that contains everything needed for media
playback.

On the other hand, I've found jlGui which being Java based doesn't
need more than itself and the Java JRE available (runs just fine under
OpenJDK 7, luckily included in the LiveCD),

http://www.javazoom.net/jlgui/jlgui.html

... and can even be launched with a single click from a web link using
Java Web Start (with the provided Icedtea web launcher)....
http://goo.gl/b7QwY

BUT, there's always a BUT.... Unfortunately it does MP3 and Vorbis
playback, not WMA...

The good news is that their pure-Java mp3 decoder is even licensed
under the LGPL... http://www.javazoom.net/javalayer/javalayer.html

Back to WMA... I suspect Micros~1 must have a patent or two on wma
audio playback... yet ffmpeg authors reverse engineered their own wma
decoder back in 2002. Too bad ffmpeg isnt even included in the F18
livecd, otherwise it'd be a matter of creating a jlGui wrapper using
this http://code.google.com/p/jjmpeg/

Oh well, will keep looking. Thanks everyone.

FC

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.

PS2: No, converting all files to other format is not an option. And
installing F18 to HD, as of right now, is not possible. Maybe soon,
but not now. So I'll keep using F18 off a LiveCD for now...


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