Review of Fluendo Codec Pack and DVD Player in openSUSE with Gnome

By -
+Fluendo  aims at improving the global multimedia experience in the Free Software world by funding, developing and maintaining the +GStreamer  media framework and providing a wide range of commercial and free products on top of it.

For this test I did a clean install of +openSUSE  12.2 with the +GNOME  3 environment. I endeavored where possible to only use the multimedia applications included as part of our Gnome 3 pattern. So for most things I've used either Totem or +Banshee  which both use the GStreamer framework, which is what the Fluendo Codec pack is for, and what their DVD Player is based on.

The Fluendo codec pack promises superior playback capability with hardware acceleration. It certainly delivers an overall better multimedia experience. As I mentioned I have endeavored to keep a minimal install. Typically I have found Banshee to be glitchy and unpredictable. Though I knew Banshee was a darling media player for many, I hadn't the least idea why. However, after installing the Fluendo Codec Pack the way Banshee works is inexplicably better, and I to have become a fan. Also Totem (which is usually a steaming pile of $%!^) behaved much better with the Fluendo Codec Pack. Overall, my opinion on purchasing this would be this; whether you need it or not, the refined playback and compatibility make for a more enjoyable multimedia experience under Linux with less fuss than other means.

Unlike their Codec Pack, the Fluendo DVD Player was disappointing. Now, it does play DVD's, and plays them beautifully. However, I have found a few cases where disks that should have played, simply didn't. The interface leaves much to be desired. It is not suitable to new users since in order to use this software properly you'd need to have at least an elementary understanding of how devices are depicted in the Linux filesystem. I found that most of the configuration options that were shown either were unresponsive, or broken to the point of being unintelligible. There has been an update fixing that now, though the usage of the software is still ridiculously complicated. Bottom line is this; get it if you watch a lot of DVD movies, and know how devices are shown in a Linux filesystem.

Interesting sidenote: +Novell holds a license to redistribute these. I think they were going to include them in +SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or maybe try making a home desktop.


Comments

Post a Comment

Please share your insights, opinions, or questions. In that order preferably :p

Popular posts from this blog

Dual Boot configuration for Windows 10 and openSUSE with full UEFI and Secureboot support

By -
Image
Questions and preamble As has become normal, the FOSS/Linux community is peppered with anxiety over yet another major change to the tech landscape issuing forth from Redmond. With the release of Windows 10 comes a great many questions for the thoughtful, and this is especially true for our very own Linux communities. With gratitude we can recall our own past relief upon discovering that UEFI and Secureboot are not the herald of the end-times we had feared them to be. That being so does not however relieve the question of safely upgrading our dual-booting computers to Windows 10 without losing our ability to run Linux in tandem. Excitement for Windows 10 was largely absent in me. I had grown quickly comfortable to the Windows 8.1 work-flow as it shared some similarities in those key areas which I had already grown to love in the GNOME Shell. Further, Windows served a role limited to usage for proprietary software that I deemed not sensible to coax into service on a Linux OS. Howev...
Read more

Life without Netflix, streaming on Linux can be awesome!

By -
    For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.     First off, when we are talking about Netflix we should consider why it is that it is so dominant. The opinions will vary, but I'll present my analysis. Hands down, Netflix has the largest selection of streaming movies, but that is where its superiority ends. Though there are many services, most are either too narrow, too expensive, or lack content; thus I will not cover them since we are lo...
Read more

YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob

By -
For those not intimately familiar with +SUSE  and +openSUSE  , it bears mentioning what YaST actually is. YaST is our administrative control panel, composed of numerous modules for Software Management, User Management, Partitioning, and a variety of other tasks. It has interfaces implemented with +GTK  , +Qt Project  , and a command line interface. The command line interface is particularly nice in the case that you are running a server without a graphical environment, or if for some reason your graphical environment is not working. YaST even powers our very advanced graphical installer, providing us with power and stability during the install process that I haven't seen any other distribution able to replicate. WebYaST brings the power of YaST to remote administration, allowing you to remotely administer your machines from a comfortable web-based graphical interface. For a couple of years now I've been hearing rumors about YaST being swit...
Read more