[SGVLUG] linux based video conversion

[Martin Bähr]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 11:01:27PM -0700, Dustin wrote:
> I seem to recall that transcode is supposed to convert most anything to
> most anything and is the command-line tool used by many graphical tools. I
> have not used it myself. Naturally, it isn't available in stock Debian
> because they're worried about legal problems. 

the legal problems arise from needing those binary codecs to read the
files. a stripped down transcode that only supports free codecs could
well be in debian, it's probably just not worth the effort.

> The Debian debs have a bitter hatred of
> mplayer so they don't ship it, 

again, licensing problems.
the hatred comes from a claim that mplayer code itself was violating
some license somewhere, my last reading is that this has been resolved,
and mplayer should appear in debian eventually (ubuntu has it already)

> I tried a
> third-party build of mplayer on Debian once and it was just unusable,

where did you get that build from?
i had hardly any issues with the mplayer builds i got from marillat
always worked fine. (marillat btw is an official debian developer, so
his mplayer packages, despite being unofficial, are not third party, but
are as good as any official ones will be since he'll make those too)

i use mplayer mostly. on the off chance that i got errors with mplayer,
so far vlc has managed to help me out.

greetings, martin.
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