The end of a pretty small, pretty niche era.
  • Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    21 hours ago

    So sometime in the future while setting up your Raspberry Pi to run Ubuntu desktop to run your media to the projector you can ditch the

    sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

    Sudo apt install ffmpeg

    That’s the last place I’ve seen it and it was a bad idea anyway as the Pi’s decoder sucked ass for certain media.

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    173·
    2 days ago

    Saved you a click: It was the underlying mpeg-related patents used by the DivX codec. Filed by Siemens AG.

    I remember back in the day that this was why everyone preferred xvid instead.

    • picnic@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      41·
      23 hours ago

      Ohh siemens ag are the baddies? I just bought their stock. I wouldnt have, had I known about this.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
        71·
        2 days ago

        No.

        It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).

        Nowadays it’s almost entirely irrelevant. Unless you are in a tiny minority of users who need to play DivX-encoded video (a codec which is 25 years old at this point) for some reason, you don’t need to care at all.

        Basically, this just made life of a few media horder nerds a tiny bit more convenient. Frankly i shouldn’t be typing out a comment this long to even explain it…

        • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
          9·
          2 days ago

          The one button in the installer you are remembering is actually unrelated. It’s the gahnome people taking worst from winblows as usual and sticking with it after the last benefits die.

          This time it’s the video codec system (instead of just using ffmpeg lul), they called it “gstreamer”. If you try to install ALL gstreamer plugins, it will be some two digit gibibyte number (don’t remember exactly). The button in the installer installs most popular plugins.

          Now, applications that try to use it will do anything but tell you what you are missing. Segfault, “whoopsie daisy unknown error”, just hang around and so on and so forth. Chances are, it’s not in dependencies either, recommended or required. One would think the ffmpeg plugin in the base set can do anything, but as it turns out it can’t. For some reason.

          • balsoft@lemmy.ml
            7·
            2 days ago

            IIRC the reason gstreamer was split up this way was originally due to varying quality and legal status of plugins, so it was kinda related.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Not for linux itself, no, but for desktos distros it makes it hard to keep it fully open source and free of proprietary stuff.

        • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
          11·
          2 days ago

          I don’t actually remember when it was the last time I heard about divx. 10-15 years ago? I think that the title is clickbait and overdramatization.