A long thread has started in the phoebe-list over at Red Hat, people arguing that Mp3 capabilities should/shouldn’t be included in Red Hat’s products. Mike Harris of Red Hat replied to the issue and gave a clear answer about the facts.The obvious answer to his remarks is that Red Hat could develop in-house a non-GPL mp3 player (could still be open source, just not GPL because of its restrictions) that could get distributed only with the commercial versions of the OS. But then, the question would be if this is a viable business decision to put a lot of effort, money and time on a piece of software that is not needed much in the markets Red Hat is after. Harries replied that Red Hat is not after the home desktop market:
“Microsoft *totally* dominates the desktop market, and
at this point in time going up against them head to head in
desktop space would be complete total utter suicide (IMHO).
There will be a time and a place for Linux on the home desktop.
When and where it will be, and wether it will be something that
can turn a profit remains to be seen. When Red Hat believes it
may be a viable market to enter, then I’m sure we will.
Personally, in my own opinion, I don’t think it will be viable
for at least 1.5 – 2 years minimum. There are however companies
out there that differ in opinion, and you can see them trying to
enter this space right now, and “take on Microsoft” so to speak.”
Please note that Red Hat is after the Corporate desktop instead.
>> Short version: Give it up. Use ogg.
I like that.
>> People who want MP3 support, presumeably are planning on using such support to play MP3 content which they legally own. That would mean that they have the original music or content on CDROM or some other medium.
I like that too.
And I think this is one of the best posts in the whole thread:
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phoebe-list/2003-March/005380.h…
I really respect RedHat, their stance on this issue, and the fact that they have a great, solid, long-term vision of both the company and Linux in general.
Well, despite that many people have hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of illegal MP3s om their computer (I’m not saying it’s right, just a fact of life), there is still tons of legal content (streaming or otherwise) on the web in MP3 format – AFAIK, OGG is of little-to-no use in this instance.
I don’t have a problem with not including MP3 support, but make it easy for the user to obtain, such as a menu option (or whatever) that says ‘Download MP3 plugin’, etc. This also goes for all of the web plugins like Quicktime, Flash, etc.
they are absolutely right not including it,
it takes a minute to install mp3 support and they at least are very careful about the future and _think_
It’s very easy to add MP3 support to RedHat…lots of wonderful pre-packaged RPMs to do so.
Also, it is Red Hat’s right to protect their own ass, in the era of the DMCA and various other assinine laws, one really can’t blame them.
Red Hat’s not preventing you from listening to MP3s on their distro, they’re just making you have to do a little work to get it.
Besides, nobody is twisting your arm to use Red Hat, as far as I know, Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, Lindows, and the rest all include MP3 support
So all of you whiners quit ya bitchin
-bytes256
To all those who complain about Redhat not including mp3 support, why
dont you just create a site where people can go and download the missing/exluded packages?
By the time those people stop bi$@#ing, they would have been done
making the page.
BTW, it only took me 5 minutes to search, download, and install the
missing/excluded packages.
I dont have a problem installing mp3 support. I understand exactly where they are coming from. I wish that I could just convert to OGG but my Archos won’t let me.
I just wish someone would make a little portable ogg player, like those nice mini mp3 players I see at best buy. I want one that will take compact flash or smartmedia cards. That would be excellent.
Most of the newer MP3 players (say, around the time of the iPod) use fairly speedy ARM ships (over 100 MHz) and some use programmable DSPs. Assuming upgradeable firmware, adding real time OGG support should be very possible. hell, PDA’s can do it, right? Music sync’ing programs are coming even for the free unices.
–JM
To all those who complain about Redhat not including mp3 support, why
dont you just create a site where people can go and download the missing/exluded packages?
While I’m not diagreeing with you about the exclusing of MP3 support from Redhat, if someone were to create a website where you could download the plugin (I’m sure one already exists anyway), how the hell are new users who buy the thing shrink-wrapped supposed to know that the web site even exists? The only thing I noticed when I installed Redhat 8 is that not only was mp3 support excluded, but so were most of the web plugins one would need, and clicking on the ‘Need plugin’ icons on Mozilla only took you to the plugin maker’s website, most of whom (such as Quicktime) had no Linux version available for download.
The best way to do is to have an icon within the OS (like in the start menu) for each plugin that you click, and it auto-downloads the plugin for you.
The problem with your suggestion is that even linking to such material could get Red Hat into legal trouble. Honestly, installing such things as MP3, Java, and Mozilla Plug-ins really aren’t that difficult, compared to most operations on Linux. I would venture to say that a simple Google for “RedHat MP3” would give you newbie-friendly instructions for adding MP3 support to RedHat…same thing for all of the plugin’s that are necessary.
-bytes256
the first result from google pointed to xmms.org, which seems to be hacked 😉 (can somebody hack bush’s brain, please)
:O) bombombom ————– all your bass are belong to us ————– props to rebel, nebunu, suspect, xmb, freestyler, saddam hussein happy birthday neb
rooted by allah
…to put my computer to work and convert all my MP3s to OGGs
Anyway, it’s good to see that people are understanding why RedHat doesn’t included MP3 support. Unfortunately it’s the Corporate Lawyer Republic out there, and people should protect their asses.
to put my computer to work and convert all my MP3s to OGGs
Do you lose any sound quality doing that? (As I understand it, whenever you go from mp3 to CD Audio/wav and back, you lose a little something each time.)
Well you would have to convert the mp3 to wav which is lossless but it would recompress the compressed sound creating worse quality. Depending on how well the original mp3 was created what bitrate, etc, it could be neglibable.
If you have the original music, it would be best to just rerip and encode in ogg format.
Right, largely how codecs of this type works is that they use a function that extracts the sine waves that summed together produce the audio, frequencies that are not interesting are then removed and the remaining ones saved. When the audio is decompressed again one simply adds these sine waves together and the produce an uncompressed audio signal quite close to the original.
The problem is that if you sum the sine waves together you are bound to have trouble picking them apart the exact same way again, especially with a different codec. This means the new set of sine waves does not look much like the ones one used to have so new information will be cut.
As a small note the methods for picking waves to remove is the interesting part of the codec in most cases, other than the obvious method of removing the waves with the least amplitude one also does things like removing waves that are close in frequency to waves with very highamplitude since theywill be drowned anyway. All in all an art rather than science since the workings of the human ear is complex.
XMMS.ORG has been cracked!
It is sad, that some people seem to feel intelligent because of missuse the ptrace-bug (i think, i do not really know if it is).
greez,
– wonderedboy
“Do you lose any sound quality doing that? (As I understand it, whenever you go from mp3 to CD Audio/wav and back, you lose a little something each time.)”
The way you lose sound quality is by converting mp3 to ogg or vice versa. Ogg and mp3 both throw away different things. Wav files are uncompressed so you would lose nothing converting to those. However if you converted the wavs back to their original format you are bound to lose something depending on the settings you use and how different they are or perhaps if the encoder if different.
Any thoughts as to if ogg will succeed as far as the ‘average joe’ is concerned? With the constant talk about linux vs. windows (which is largely pointless, IMHO) is mp3 already established as the de-facto standard for music files or does ogg actually stand a chance? Mp3 sharing is ‘easy’ for the average joe, what’s the chance that he/she’ll go to the effort of looking into what ogg files are?
Its funny how Linux people often go on about using standards and how much they dislike MS’s “embrace and extend” approach, but that is what OGG is doing really. Yes, I know it is technically better than MP3, but MP3 is the standard right now. Embracing the widespread use of compressed music, and extending into another format is not always helpful. I have still yet to see a really good OGG player so MP3 is here to stay for a while yet.
@Anonymous “MP3 is here to stay for a while yet”:
” I have still yet to see a really good OGG player so MP3 is here to stay for a while yet.”
Funny, at last check both WinAMP and XMMS support OGG, and are widely considered to be “really good OGG players”
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
Say this on slashdot about a month ago. Looks interesting.
Yes, it can happen. There are MP3 portable players out on the market there that can be upgraded to support .Ogg files. Actually as a musician and a proponent of open standards I just don’t understand why MP3, a proprietry format, has become the defacto standard. Does the computing world have to take every closed sourced licensed shite and make it the main standard (Windows anyone)?
Oggs are better quality, they don’t hurt the musicians if they want to distribute their music for money over the net, and there is a hell of a lot of support with players both hardware and software. So why are we putting up with bloody MP3’s. Sometimes the world really gets up my nose.
I personally refuse to use MP3’s on my systems but then again, I’m just ripping my legitimate music so I don’t have to use CD’s. How about the rest of you?
Why is it an issue that redhat doesnt ship programs for dealing with mp3 ? Last I installed Win2k, it didn’t either. People wanting a mp3 player get online and download it.
Funny how the linux drones will JUST comment on how good ogg is compared to mp3 here, and they will say NOTHING regarding Mike Harris’ comments that Linux is not ready for the desktop.
Where is your “Linux/kde rules, and its experience is better than windows'” now? Why everyone has suddenly shutted up on the issue, while you will jump like monkeys on every other occasion to let us know how great Linux and KDE is on the desktop?
I believe the poster was referring to hardware OGG players.
Re-ripping is the only way to go. Transcoding always worsens the quality though it may be in very subtle ways.
3 yrs ago I started ripping my CD collection to mp3 then because HDD space got tight, I transcoded them to the more compact wma (DRM was’t on my radar then, and my middle aged ears hardly perceived any extra loss).
Recently I did much more intense listening tests of codecs at different bit-rates using different music genres.
I noticed the worst losses were in the left-right channel separation and the transcoded songs were particularly affected. Beatles songs like Sgt Pepper suffered most.
I’ve since re-ripped everything to ogg and doubled the bit-rate for good measure since HDDs are now so cheap.
Another advantage stated by xiph.org IIRC is that high bit rate ogg files can more easily be bit stripped when downloading to players where storage becomes an issue again. However has any player yet got an ogg upgrade?
Brian
I just don’t understand why MP3, a proprietry format, has become the defacto standard. Does the computing world have to take every closed sourced licensed shite and make it the main standard (Windows anyone)?
Well, if I remember correctly, when I first discovered MP3 files sometime in 96-97, OGG did not exist, or at least I didn’t know about it, so MP3 seemed the logical choice at the time, since it was the only option
Even now, I’m not aware of any casual users who even have a clue what OGG is.
As for now, it is a fact that most people back in the day got their music from web/ftp searches, then Napster, and now Kazaa/WinMX/whatever.
So, once you’ve got 1,000+ MP3s in your collection and have the CDs for only a few of them, switching to OGG at this point would be a little inconvenient or downright impossible without loss of quality in the sound. I mean, hell … think about even legitimate uses like mp3.com, which has probably over a million songs in MP3 format, and the original records to almost none of them (because they’re uploaded in MP3 format). So, what then?
Most of the newer MP3 players (say, around the time of the iPod) use fairly speedy ARM ships (over 100 MHz) and some use programmable DSPs. Assuming upgradeable firmware, adding real time OGG support should be very possible.
To get the real bang for your buck with ogg you need true floating point calculations. As far as I know ARM chips are integer processors (I could be wrong).
I really think RedHat needs to rethink this…I don’t have any answer to the problem, but it is definately a problem. When I installed RedHat on my girlfriends computer, we transferred all her mp3’s over to the linux partition, and i forgot that redhat didn’t have mp3 support. So later on I find out she was trying to use xmms to play the things and that wasn’t working, then she tried opening them with konqueror, which just crashed when she tried to open them. She had no idea that RedHat didn’t have mp3 support, she thought the whole thing was borked and had no way of knowing otherwise or knowing where to go. Even if she had it would have been a hastle to do so. I’m sure many other people that aren’t Linux gurus have had the same type of problem too. Eventually we did get all of her stuff working and now she knows to search for ogg whenever possible.
I realize that ogg is much better quality and from my experience is much smaller in size, and I did go through the terrible hastle of making a perl script to convert all 1000+ of my mp3s to oggs…I don’t notice a sound quality drop, but it took a long time and was a hastle to do in the first place.
RedHat should also not be so naive and assanine to say that people should own the cds and just rerip them. I think it’s not very hard to realize that most people that have music on their machine don’t own the cds. Actually some of the music I have on my computer I had on cds, but I threw out the cds after I ripped them. Most people get their music from file sharing networks and wether that is right or not is not the point, the point is they’ll have to either reencode, redownload, or most likely remove RedHat and replace it with something else. Also RedHat shouldn’t be telling people to rip cds when the only ripper that I could find on RedHat 8, grip, was not configured properly for ogg, or ide-scsi support…a lot of people wouldn’t even be able to rip their cds in the first place.
RedHat definately needs to improve on the media support in general I think. I really like what RedHat has done with their distrobution in most areas…but when it comes to movie players, mp3 players, flash, or even just trying to burn an audio cd…..the software is not on the cds….and that just sucks.
> To get the real bang for your buck with ogg you need true
> floating point calculations. As far as I know ARM chips
> are integer processors (I could be wrong).
There is a fixed-point implementation of the Vorbis decoder called Tremor so it is possible to implement it on ARM processors
see http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/hardware.html
I am not sure your really understand the interview. To be blunt: Redhat is not intesreted by your Girl’s friend computer. They do not target the home market. They are not interested by multi-media support, at least for now.
They are a small company, they must focus on what bring them money. Right now, it is the server market. Most likely, some companies, happy with Redhat server solution, have some request for the desktop. So Redhat is now trying to extend his offer to the business desktop. Multimedia is very low on the priority list for Business.
Sure you can download an RPM to add MP3 support to XMMS, but its pretty difficult to support to Noatun. Not that I’m a huge fan of Noatun, but I do like KDE (and it’s nice to have a well integrated MP3 player).
Also (and this is more important then Noatun support), how hard will it be to make Konqueror be able to preview MP3 files (by holding mouse pointer over a file)? I love this feature on my current Redhat 8 (with KDE 3.1) system.
American laws are stupid and a definitive way would be Red hat move to another country, like many peer-to-peers software companies. Or use another foreign RH-based distribution like Mandrake or Conectiva…
that you can download a plugin quickly, but he cannot assume that you can just replace it all with ogg. I have mp3’s that I ripped from CD’s and I play them on an mp3 player. I cannot use ogg. Also, lots of free music is provided as mp3’s. New bands distribute their music as mp3 on their website. Amazon allow you to sample music before you buy the CD’s in MP3. It is stupid to say ‘just use ogg’.
In response to this (which was a users comment on the pclinuxonline site)…
You can’t expect people to use your operating system when the scanner they just bought is rendered useless or they can’t connect and use their mp3 player, digital camera etc with out being an expert or sysadmin.
Anyone can start up XMMS and realise that it can’t play MP3s, so they’d go to the XMMS site to find out why (after all, this is a generic audio player – it SHOULD be able to play MP3s in their opinion). When they arrive, a message on the front page explains why the XMMS that RH distibute has MP3 support removed and provides hyperlinks to the relevant RPM files. Downloading them and double clicking on them prompts for the root password (which the user knows since they told the OS what it was at install time), and the installs MP3 support. It’s not very difficult. In fact, is as easy (if not slightly easier/faster) than installing Winamp on Windows.
I just wish someone would make a little portable ogg player, like those nice mini mp3 players I see at best buy. I want one that will take compact flash or smartmedia cards. That would be excellent.
You want one of these then…
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
There is a fixed-point implementation of the Vorbis decoder called Tremor so it is possible to implement it on ARM processors
Heh, now I don’t know whether to be happy that it’s possible or pissed that SonicBlue is screwing me out of possible ogg support on my rio volt
.
I got ogg support on my Sharp Zaurus from a free plugin. But its not really stable at the moment.
Heh…
You honestly expect us to believe that you threw out all of the CDs that you spent your hard-earned money on?! Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!
And RedHat owe you nothing. NOTHING!
>You honestly expect us to believe that you threw out all of the CDs that you spent your hard-earned money on?!
yes, 90% of my cd’s are in the trash…my computer is my stereo…i’m not saying i don’t download anything off file sharing networks….but a lot of the media on my computer i did own at one point….I’m too messy for cds, either i throw them out, or they’re gonna get all scratched up in a pile of trash and i’m gonna flip out later when they skip *shrugs*
>And RedHat owe you nothing. NOTHING!
Well I suppose they don’t owe me anything…I did buy a couple of their distros when I could have just downloaded the things, but I realize that doesn’t give me automatic input…I’m not extermely concerned with it anyway…I run gentoo…I just think that they are really confusing people and making things difficult when it doesn’t have to be that way….just my two cents
Any thoughts as to if ogg will succeed as far as the ‘average joe’ is concerned?
Yes, completely. You see, this “average joe” isn’t encoding his own music to mp3 from cds. He is downloading it. Chances are he may not know it is even an mp3 to him it is a “music file” or possibly even a “napster” or “kazaa” file. What matters is getting the people who do the actual encoding/sharing to switch to ogg. Will this ever happen? It could. But I know most of these people don’t care about sound quality because they seem to LOVE 96kbps and 128kbps mp3’s, which are awful to one’s ears. However, they do seem to care a lot about file size, and if ogg is more convenient in that way (I don’t know, I always encode huge 256 kbps oggs) then some will switch. I’m sure some already have.
Seriously man… You must be a hippie.
I HATE hippies!
I mean, I’ve heard you should make backup copies of your
stuff but I must have missed the point about thowing
away the originals
And if you don’t play the CD’s they wont scratch, thus
no need to throw’em.
Peder