Trilight Zone

[digital8]

By Rony Gabriel <ronygabriel@yahoo.com>
Posted: ( 2000-12-26 15:39:44 EST by )
Grab some popcorn! These are great times for watching
movies on your desktop. There have never been so many
options available. Read on for more about the choices
you have under Linux for MPEG/VCD playback.

Word had been going around that the special effects for
Titanic were made on a Linux cluster. In spite of this and
all the spectacular stories we hear about Linux, I still
couldn't see Jim Carrey yelling "Somebody stop me" on my
machine. Well, this is not true anymore. Now, not only can I
listen to Jim Carrey, I can also hear the dinosaurs stomping
in my backyard! Video is very much alive and kicking on Linux.
This article is a look at the video libraries and players
available on Linux.

1. Smpeg [http://www.lokigames.com/development/smpeg.php3]
Loki software is more famous for making Linux gaming a whole
new experience. They have released the motion jpeg and mpeg
players which they use in their software to the public domain
(GPL). Smpeg is an mpeg player, which can do both audio and video
playback. Smpeg is now part of the Red Hat distribution. It also
supports fullscreen display using SDL.

2. Avifile [http://divx.euro.ru/]
Mpeg4 Divx movies are of very high quality and more
importantly, small size. But, there was no open source
implementation available till now. Wine came to the rescue. What
we have now, is a very good Divx and asf player for Linux
based on Wine. It uses the Windows dll's to play the video. Audio
is played separately. Try playing the Divx trailers available
from http://divx.ctw.cc/. Requires SDL and Qt libraries.

3. Xtheater [http://Xtheater.sourceforge.net/]
GTK based GUI for playing video. It uses avifile and smpeg
and hence can support Divx , asf and mpeg movies. It also
comes with the usual bells and whistles -- GNOME compliance,
drag and drop plus full screen display using SDL.

4. XMMS plugins [http://www.xmms.org/]
Now you can manage your mp3 and movie play lists in one place.
XMMS has an smpeg-xmms plugin to play mpeg movies and VCD's. It
supports full screen playback using SDL. There is an avi-xmms
plugin, which uses the avifile library to provide support for Divx
inside xmms.

5. XMPS [http://xmps.sourceforge.net/]
The X Movie Player System was originally intended to overcome
defects with xmms when playing video. This was one of the first
good players on linux. The project shows very low activity with
no new release for quite sometime now. Grab it and try it out.
Plays mpeg (using smpeg) and Divx (using avifile).

6. Other Libraries/UIs/etc

- Lamp [http://pauillac.inria.fr/lamp/].
This player is quite good. The only drawback is that the site
hasn't shown any activity for quite some time now.
- Check out Mpeglib [http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/].
- Don't miss [http://heroine.linuxave.net/] to
try out Xmovie, libmpeg3, and Quicktime for Linux.
- Take a look at Xine [http://xine.sourceforge.net/]. Xine
can play VCDs (good seek support), DVDs and mpeg movies.

7. Shareware players

- MTV [http://www.mpegtv.com/]. This is a very good VCD
player for Linux. This software is not free. It's distributed
as shareware.

8. DVD Playback

Information is available at [http://www.linuxvideo.org/].
I personally haven't tried DVD playback yet.

9. Other useful video software

(i) Xanim [http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/].
One of the first video players on Linux, Xanim has big
plans for their Next Generation player.
(ii) RealPlayer [http://www.real.com/].
(iii) Aktion. Aktion can play mpeg movies.
(iv) X2divx [http://www.emulinks.de/divx/]
Conversion software to convert mpeg and avi to divx
(v) Vcdgear [http://www.vcdgear.com/]
For conversion, extraction and repair of VCD file formats.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are many more video players
on the net. Some are missing from this article because I've never
heard of them or I couldn't get them to compile and run. So,
don't forget to send that query on http://www.google.com/linux
before watching Trinity say "Dodge this" in "The Matrix.