Video Playback

When I was working on the book, my wife's little brother sent me a video called " teasingc.mpg " ”a cute little movie of two housecats wrestling ”actually a kitten who antagonizes a full-grown cat into tackling him. Relatively funny . But I didn't know that, because I use Linux to read e-mail, and I didn't have a multimedia player installed on my system. The little MPG aggravated me. I wanted to watch it ”after all, it had taken a couple of whole seconds to come down through my cable modem. To top it off, I had a handful of other little movies that friends had mailed to me ”a couple of AVIs, an ASF file, and some more MPEGs. Determined to remedy this situation, I headed off to freshmeat , and started researching .

I found that there was software to play video files, but it involved a near-dizzying array of package dependencies, which took me the better part of two days to figure out. While chatting with the other authors, they admitted they'd never managed to get AVI/MPG playback working on their systems. This, I thought, was a worthy subject to include in this chapter. I'll cover what packages you need to install, but I'm going to do it in the reverse order in which I found them ”because every package I found had three packages that had to be installed before it. So I'll hand you the packages in the order they need to be installed.

I got MPG playback to work first and then worked on AVI playback. I had long since given up on viewing AVIs under Linux ”after all, AVI is an MS Windows “only format, pretty much. Have you ever tried to watch an AVI on the MacOS? I tried years ago, and didn't have much luck (things have probably changed by now). But while researching MPEG playback, I stumbled on the release of avifile on freshmeat. Sure enough, it was exactly what I needed.

Now, remember how I mentioned I would do things in reverse order? I'm going to cover AVI/ASF first, because I can.