(no subject)

[torkell]

Found via slashdot: The EU Council does not stream the meetings in a Linux-friendly way, because "[they] cannot support Linux in a legal way."

So what does the FOSS crowd suggest? Theora, a codec that isn't even out of alpha. I can't speak for anyone else, but last I knew "alpha" meant "for early testing only, may be extremely buggy and fail in bad ways".

Personally, I'd recomment RealPlayer. They're the only one who've actually got the whole thing of *streaming* video right, and as a bonus it runs under all major systems.

Comments

[torkell]

It's nowhere near as spywaretastic as it used to be, and in the curent version you can completely kill the message centre. Alternatively, grab the BBC version - that's a special package of it without the spywaretastic goodness.

My main reason for liking RealPlayer is that they understand streaming, and designed their whole player/codec around that. The streaming support in WMV/QT has always felt like an afterthought and 'bolted-on' rather than being a core part of the program.

Yep, AVI is not streamable. Currently, if you want to stream stuff you can use Microsoft/WMV, RealPlayer, Quicktime, or some user-unfriendly mix of ice/oddcast and theora/vorbis (I say user-unfriendly as there's no obvious player for any of those, unlike with WMV/RAM/MOV).

Hmm, they could use MPEG 1 or 2, those can stream over a plain HTTP connection and can be played back with stuff as old as Windows 3.0. I doubt they work particularly well at low bitrates tho.

[ralesk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know they’re really good with streaming :/ I used to have a 33.6k modem and watched news on it.

I find MPEG a viable solution :)

[torkell]

Same here, in my first year of uni I watched a couple of things on it using a vile 48k dialup (that was two years ago). Even today I take RP streams over WMV or QuickTime as the RP ones cope better with flaky connections.

Come to think of it, the only reason I even have QT installed is so I can use RP to watch QT movies. Apple horribly broke the Win32 QT viewer, to the point where it can't keep up with old (Sorenson) videos on an Athlon/1.5GHz.

[ralesk.livejournal.com]

You need QuickTit^Hme Alternative :)