[Tfug] Hate to say I told you so..

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 03:06:22PM -0800, r-lists at studiosprocket.com wrote:
>My Mac plays every DVD I've thrown at it. Ubuntu fails on the first one --
>a Disney DVD, of all things. VLC didn't make it to the menu. (I
>sympathize: I hate those trailers.) Mplayer doesn't have a UI yet. XBMC
>has a cryptic UI, but once you get past that (average: three days) and
>play the DVD, you get to the menus, and it locks the entire machine.

Good points, but a few corrections...

Mplayer has had a GUI for a very long time now.  It's gmplayer and it's
usually in the same package as mplayer.  Personally, though, I do my DVD
playing with either MythTV or Xine.  Xine handled DVD menus long before
mplayer, too.  Of the many DVDs I've thrown at the system, only one has had
problems playing that weren't related to a lousy disc (scratches, rental,
etc.).

Still, when something *does* go wrong, I've found it very hard to determine
where the problem is.  This is fairly atypical for Linux.

>Linux Workstations, on the other hand, are very different animals, and
>they're all but invisible to usage metrics based on the browser user
>agent, because the browser is 64-bit, so the plugins aren't available, so
>people don't use it. They'll use a Windows box running Firefox, or maybe a
>VM.

I don't think this is really true.  Not now and maybe not even for a year or
more.  Both Flash and Java plugins are either available in 64bit varieties or
can be made to work through wrappers.  The wrapper solution isn't perfect, but
I'd argue that at least 2/3 of people using it have it working, especially if
running Ubuntu where it's all setup automatically for you.

Are there other plugins that are used or required by a large enough group to
be statistically significant with regards to 64bit Linux workstations?


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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