[Pc_Support] Re: Reading AVI files ....

[Bryan J. Smith]

"William A. Mahaffey III" <wam at HiWAAY.net> wrote:
> .... I just got finished installing SuSE 10.0 on a new box on the 
> network at work.
> The boss-man wants to be able to play .avi files under the stock
> KDE desktop.

Just FYI, AVI codecs may have licensing that makes this difficult
from a legal standpoint -- depending on your interpretation.  Or at
least some of the software I suggest might, at least from a
redistribution perspective.

> He downloaded Real-Player 10 (I *think*)

HelixPlayer (which RealPlayer is now based on) can take various
codecs, but it is _not_ designed to play everything since various
codecs do _not_ exist.

Although some AVI support does exist, there are countless codecs. 
AVI itself is really just a streaming format, which can very in
audio/video encoding.

> Does anyone know what extra libraries I need & where to go to
> download them to play AVI files with either Real-Player 10
> or Kaffiene ? TIA.

I highly recommend MPlayer because it includes a lot of support
out-of-the-program, and then can use various Windows codecs via
WINE/WINELIB.  I haven't found anything it couldn't play yet (even
most Sorenson codecs for QTime are supported now days)!

If you were running Fedora Core/Extras, the Livna.ORG repository is a
_very_safe_ repository you can tap directly.  But there are always
"legally questionable" aspects to some of the packages on Livna.ORG
-- at least from a redistributable aspect (although maybe or maybe
not an end-user one).

Whenever you use such in a commercial environment, you must _beware_
of such legal issues.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------
I'm a Democrat.  No wait, I'm a Republican.  Hmm,
it seems I'm just whatever someone disagrees with.