Recently I've been wondering about the feasibility of producing a working Helix Player port for the Alpha. Falk Hueffner suggested I should have a look at MPlayer. What I've discovered isn't promising. There are no Debian packages, and probably won't be due to both the non-free nature of several needed components and the question of software patents. Regardless of the politics, the bottom line is that any useful (non-trivial) media player is going to have to have Alpha-specific codecs available. The MPlayer website has RealPlayer8 codecs available for the Alpha, but everything looks pretty x86-centric otherwise.
So... As things stand today I can almost build hxplay-1.0.7, but the work left to do is non-trivial. Before moving forward with this, I wouldn't mind a few comments from those who have gone before: will the finished product be able to do anything useful? I haven't approached the Helix Community yet about codecs for Alpha, but that would seem to be a necessary step. Alternatively, does anyone have a media player for the Alpha that can handle streaming audio in at least one of the semi-modern formats (RealAudio, Windows Media Audio)? I'm not worried about video at this stage. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Bob Tracy Beware the fire-and-forget weapon that [EMAIL PROTECTED] forgets who fired it. --Bill Kennedy ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]