Comments on: Multimediocre

By: Quentin Hartman

Quentin Hartman — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:00 +0000

Great thoughtful post. If you’re still in the market for a DAP, llok at the products from Cowon / iAudio. In most of their product descriptions they specifically mention Linux support, though that has flagged somewhat with their newer firmware images requiring Windows to install. However, I have a U3 and I _love_ it. It Just Works, and includes FLAC and OGG decoding, as well as a slew of other features iPods can’t touch. I don’t really need to replace my U3 it, but I am seriously lusting for an iAudio 7, which is basically a U3 with an improved interface and larger capacity. http://www.cowonamerica.com/

By: anagor

anagor — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:00 +0000

Nice post indeed, about the player, I too recommend looking at cowon players, I have their D2 player which also capable of playing video, among other options, it shows images, plays more audio formats than any other player I know and have an SD expansion slot, should you require more storage. Under Linux it shows as simple USB storage device.
iAudio7 looks very nice also.

By: Ubuntista

Ubuntista — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:00 +0000

Yep, nice post, and I agree with you on that.
I think that webcams are moving towards more open hardware, or more open specifications.
They are starting to learn that Linux is a market indeed.
For the rest… still not enough. Still… "mediocre".

By: erik

erik — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:00 +0000

There are also problems that no one is admitting that they exist actually. Perhaps this is due the key people not having any comparison points. If I for instance open a WMV video clip (works with ffmpeg+gstreamer), the colors are washed out and the image is blocky. Flash videos are not much better. 90+% of present videos on the internets being those two you should be able to see the problem…

It is *not* due my setup or versions or anything like that, I have experienced this using several distros, during several years, with several video clips, using several different hardware. It’s not very apparent until you see the competition on Windows. They do some really smart post processing, leading into a lot nicer and more vivid colors, and far less blocky video quality. The difference is so huge between those that it is a blocker level issue for some people, and some just "don’t get impressed" without realizing what the reason is and like the competitive products better - and will keep using them.

This was just one example, there are many on the field that you touched with your post. There are huge user experience related problems that are not being handled. In fact most of the developers are denying that the problems exist. There is no development on a few of these critical areas. Thus there is no hope at all.

By: Rusty

Rusty — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:00 +0000

I’m not recommending it for a media player, but I was plesantly surprised to find that my SideKick III was recognized as a multi-media device when I plugged it into my desktop after updating to Feisty Fawn in Ubuntu. It offers to open either a audio manaagement program, (Rhytmbox I believe) a photo management program, (gThumb) or to ignore the device. It still auto-mounts the drive, and provides an icon representative of a media device for that drive.

I actually have media devices that are not handled that way, and will have to investigate what I need to do to get them handled so that I can use those features. (A couple of xm/mp3 players, as well as some stand alone mp3 players.)

I don’t consider the status perfect by any means, but I am regularly surprised at support that I was not aware was there, actually working better than expected.

As with iPods, I would love to be able to sync my contacts and content between the software on my SK3 and my desktop, but the only sync software that is out there does not support Linux, and apparently never will (restricted contract between them and Microsoft apparently.) I can’t see the data on the USB connection, but it is available on the internet. Screen scraping seems to me to be a stupid way to manage contacts, schedules, and notes, but that may be the only way that I will get that sort of stuff done.

All of that said, it is my decision to either move to a different platform, or live with the issue and make my desires known to the relevant developers or companies. Or for that matter look into developing tools myself, or find someone who is willing to work on those tools. Complaining that their not supported, and saying that this is the fault of the OSS community would be stupidity on my part. By electing to use OSS software, I am a part of the OSS community. Either I put up with the lack of support, or I work on solving the problem of lack of support and make it supported. Complaining in this case is whining.