Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 23rd Feb 2003 20:42 UTC
Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn't always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world's first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots. Update: Added one more screenshot.
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I understand that it's not a big issue to add mp3 support to redhat 8. And if you only use xmms it's not a real big deal for this new beta as well. I wonder though, if any of you have tried some more advanced audio features and had similar experiences.
See, one of the big things that I've been looking forward to from the gnome2.2 based distro's is the nautilus-media bit. That really nice audio list view and player that's embedded into nautilus. If someone has an easy way to add mp3 support to it in phoebe...do tell...please. The problem is that it's no longer about just xmms. Alot of features of redhats multimedia are now going to be intertwined and built off of gstreamer. And believe me, even with apt gstreamer can be a real pain to get installed(even under 8.0). So last night I started to go about installing mp3 support under phoebe. First I got the xmms plugin working...no big deal. Then I realized that nautilus would not even show id3 info for my mp3's let alone play them. It just sits there and says "no info yet". So I first I had to compile mad, lame, id3lib, mpg123, and a few other mp3 apps and libs just for good measure. Then I grabed the gstreamer and gstreamer-plugins source from the gstreamer site and compiled those(The redhat gstreamer plugin package does not have the mad plugin). And that's where I'm at so far. Gstreamer now plays mp3's without a problem. Unfortunately, Nautilus displays the same behaviour as it did before. No love for the mp3's. My guess is that I should probably recompile Nautilus but I'm a little scared of that. The latest Nautilus under Gentoo was great but no matter what I tried it would not access my windows shares through smb://blah . (and yes I did have my smb client software installed properly. Doing a smbclient -L blah showed my domain just fine). Redhat's version however, does fine with it. So I may be in for a big trade off.
Anyway, my point is this...
Redhats decision to leave out mp3 support is just going to get harder and harder to deal with as our desktops evolve. The media subsystems are getting more and more pervasive with embedded players and adding mp3 support to it may not be trivial anymore. I'm sure a good apt archive could take care of some of these issues but I wouldn't ever count on it being as easy as it was with 8.0 again.
I would really appreciate anyone elses experiences with this and alternative ways that you went about it.