Chapter 10. Multimedia Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Burning CDs and DVDs in Fedora Core Linux

• Sound and Music

• Viewing TV and Video

• Using Still Cameras with Fedora

• Using Scanners in Fedora Core Linux

• Graphics Manipulation

• Reference

Movies, music, animation, live videoconferencing, and other multimedia functions have become essential capabilities for many home and business computing environments. Without question, multimedia has driven the growth of the Internet and the advances in computer hardware as much as the traditional services of mail, news, and other Internet-related services.

Fedora includes several different programs you can use to perform feats of magic that include graphics, video, and audio formats used on other, less capable operating systems.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the basic multimedia tools included with Fedora. You will see how to create your own CDs, watch TV, rip audio CDs into the open-source OGG audio format for playback, scan and manipulate graphics images, and perform other productive and enjoyable tasks.

NOTE

Continuing a move begun with the release of Red Hat 9, the Fedora Project maintains a philosophy that has been controversial with many longtime users. Because of concerns of potential liability arising from copyright and patent issues in the United States, Red Hat and the Fedora Project have voluntarily removed any functionality that could violate the intellectual property rights of others or subject Red Hat to any penalties. That does not mean individual users would be violating those same rights, so we have provided resources to the reader as to how some of that functionality can be restored; the choice is yours.

By installing and using apt or yum as described in Chapter 7, "Managing Software and System Resources," you can easily restore full multimedia functionality to Fedora.

Because Fedora uses UTF-8 language encoding, some non-Fedora applications will have display problems if they are not UTF-8 compliant. You can fix this by placing the following line in /etc/bashrc:

 export LANG=en_US SUPPORTED="en_US" LC_MESSAGES=C LC_ALL=C