Yosef's Blog: January 2008

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Command-line flac player

This is a cute little command line flac format music player. You can get it Here, or though the Add/Remove Software tab on the Applications menu (in Fedora).

Pirate Bay hit with legal action

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Trouble with Fedora 8 and proprietary codecs

So you just re-installed Red Hat Fedora with the newest version, Fedora 8. You got a ton of media players to try out, and as a test run you try to play a wmv file. Oops, sorry, it won't work. Because Fedora Red Hat doesn't want to be liable for installing third-party proprietary codecs, which they'd rather the end user do, they tell you that you can get the codec at $16.99 at some site. (This is what CodecBuddy does.) The link tells you that using open-source formats is better. But you have a whole hard drive full of music in mp3 and video in wma and wmv format. What are you supposed to do?
There is a solution I found. Get MPlayer in the "add-remove software" option in the top Applications menu, or from the MPlayer website. Then, go to this Fedora 8 Installation Guide. Scroll down to Media players and follow the instructions, then scroll down a bit more to the binary codecs. Installation is a snap when you follow the instructions on the help guide. For ease-of-use (unless you know you have a 64-bit machine) just use the link to the tar provided. Configure the preferences to use pulse, and you can watch that wmv video in style!

Update: MPlayer may not play flac format music files.

(tags: Fedora wmv, Fedora 8 wmv, Fedora 8 wmv player, Fedora codecs, wmv Fedora 8)

Monday, January 07, 2008

Yet another rootkit affecting Windows

These days I spend half my time on newly-reconfigured Linux Red Hat Fedora 8. This article just strengthens my resolve to try to stick with Linux from now on, except when I feel I must play BZFlag or use the Flightgear Flight Simulator.