Or mpv / SMPlayer wrapper. I found that on my SL7 computers, especially
a Lenovo S20 from 2010ish, it plays with no artifacts and jump forward
or back work much better and faster than VLC. SMPlayer wrapper is
"better" than mpv in 2 ways:
1) It remembers the volume you had set from one file to the next (I
don't love max volume surprises with headphones!)
2) It has some info in the GUI it provides around mpv to teach you the
keyboard shortcuts and ostensibly let you change them. The downside is
the overlay GUI seems a little more sensitive to mouse movements and
popping up fullscreen compared to mpv or VLC (though it may also just be
the horrible garishness of the UI. Honestly, if there is a VLC GUI
wrapper for mpv player, I'd get the best of all worlds!).
nux-dextop has all the above for SL7.
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University
On 01/21/2018 06:49 PM, David Sommerseth wrote:
On 21/01/18 18:42, Dan wrote:
Dear All,
I'm vaguely aware that the standard SL (and presumably RHEL)
repositories don't contain any decoder for the H264 video codec,
because someone, somewhere considers the codec to be too heavily
patent-encumbered to distribute the decoder. I'm also vaguely aware
that some other GNU/Linux distros _do_ distribute H264 decoders. Does
anyone have any information about _why_ different distros have
reached different decisions about this question of law, please?
Red Hat has grown to become a large and rich enterprise. So for them to
gamble on possible patents hits, patent holders requiring royalties, etc, it
makes sense to have a clean separation from potential issues. When also
considering the vast amount of users both Fedora and Red Hat based products
covers, this gets a bit clearer (IMO, at least).
Debian has a similar approach as well, even though you can enable some
"non-free" repositories where you get a lot of these codecs. Similar for
Ubuntu as well, even though Ubuntu tends to ship with these repositories
enabled by default. But attacking Debian or Ubuntu is a very different type
of legal attack than on an established US enterprise.
Regardless of the emotional side of things. Many of these various codecs
_are_ patent encumbered, many also requires agreements and royalty fees to use
and distribute. And any other means of using those codecs are in violation.
You can question whether these patents are valid and if you must obey these
patents; but that's more a discussion for legal counsellors.
However, there is an alternative which resolves this in a clean way. Fluendo
(the company behind GStreamer) have their ONEPLAY Codec pack [1], which costs
€20. Support agreement (including updates to their codec pack) starts at €19
for a 5 years agreement. I consider this reasonable. I've also used their
codecs, and it feels more stable and somewhat better performing than several
of the "free" alternatives.
[1] <https://fluendo.com/en/oneplay/>
The quickest shortcut around all this without any costs is probably to get the
VLC player.
Just my 2cents.
