Playing a movie in Linux

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sat Jul 17 04:41:19 EDT 2010


I can never make my mind up whether a sleepless night where one's mind 
never stops
churning like a tumble-drier, resulting in "brilliant insights", or a 
good night's sleep
so that one can actually put one's "brilliant insights" into practice is 
better.

Well, I had a sleepless night, and am now propped up with an indecent 
amount of coffee.

My insight is not brilliant, but it at least made me well aware that the 
RunRev documentation
re playing movie files on Linux is 'slack' . . .

Insight backed up with testing this morning:

1. As one has to leverage mplayer embedded movies are 'off'.

   Consequences of this:

   1.1. The poor old end-user will have to 'fart around' (it has always 
amazed me how
          British slang phrases are generally "more robust" than 
American ones) with
          file pathways and so forth; unless, of course, somebody can 
work out how
          to manage relative pathways on Linux . . .

   1.2.  . . .  err . . . Peter ???

2. Set up a stack with a player object "PIGGY" [ this is symptomatic of 
how I feel this
     morning ] and, in the prefs palette set its source movie:

     /home/jrm/RR/4.0.0-gm-1/OINK.mov

    [ and, while we're here, I successfully copy-pasted that pathway 
from the prefs palette
      to Mozilla ThunderBird with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V ]

    2.1. How will an end-user with a standalone 're-jig' the movie 
player so that it picks
           up the movie "OINK.mov" ?

3. Apart from the fact that my Ubuntu box doesn't have the necessary 
'codexes' [ surely
     this should be 'codices'; those flaming computer people without the 
benefits of a
     Classical education; what on earth is the world coming to ? . . .  
:)  ] the file played;
     well, the sound part did.

     I suppose we would get nowhere if we expected end-users to find the 
necessary repository
     for their distro to install proprietary format codexes . . .

     [ Ubuntu spell codex 'codecs'; obviously not much Classical 
education there . . .  :) ]

     3.1. Oddly enough, despite the PDF's insistence on mplayer, I had 
the thing playing just as well

            with VLC,

            with xine,

            with Totem,

            and Xfmedia.

4. Will now try to find a movie that RunRev 4.0 + Linux understand.

     [ needless to say, the "Sample.mov" inclosed in the RR folder is 
useless on Linux; sort
       of symptomatic methinks. ]

     Why do I have a funny feeling that, quite apart from sorting out 
the Linux version, the
     Documentation (both inbuilt and PDF) need quite an overhaul re the 
Linux version?

5. Oh Joy!  The Ubuntu website has this to say: "Xfmedia is the default 
program to watch
     movies."

     Does that mean that Xfmedia is "species specific" to Ubuntu, or 
that it is in some way
     the default program for ALL Deb-derivs, or all Linuxes [ surely 
'Linuces'; those flaming
     computer people . . . cor; creeping senility . . .  :) ] ?

     5.1. . . .  err . . . Peter ?

     5.2. Why have RunRev 'fastened' on mplayer rather than Xfmedia ?



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