Avifile for DEBIAN
- Ffmpeg plugin is able to decompress DivX and many other formats without the need off Windows codecs! Also it's currently by far the FASTEST decoder I know!!
- Unofficial Debian packages which might be useful for many users could be found here - use this apt line:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main deb-src http://perso.wanadoo.fr/debian/ unstable main
Should contain Win32 codecs and other various packages which users might find very usable
- Debian binary distribution COULD NOT contain any binary encoder for MP3 encoding - Thompson is charging each distributor of such thing $25000 per year - I doubt anyone would donate money to Debian project for such purpose so do not expect this will change anytime soon :)
- But on the other hand from 2001/07/11 we have new plugin - libmp3lamebin So if you will compile Lame project for yourself and install the binary library libmp3lame.so into /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib you could use mp3 encoding capability of avirecompress tool. Lame project could be found here: http://lame.sourceforge.net/
- We also could not distribute binary codecs (Windows DLLs) - these are useful for playing most of .avi/.asf streams you will find. Most probably you will need to download them from the Internet so look at the following links for them: http://avifile.sourceforge.net http://mplayerhq.hu
- Fast OpenDivX plugin is now also part of this package - but you will need to download DivX4linux package for yourself and install it localy - in the future we may provide package for this library. This is URL for version which has been used to build to plugin: http://avifile.sourceforge.net/divx4linux-20020418.tgz
- Also separate instalation of Xvid plugin is necessary Again - I suggest Christian Marillat's site Please NOTE: You need to install latest Xvid 1.0 library which has different API, if you want to use older version, separate compilation is needed.
- Currently you could not easily select which plugin you actually want to use - this will be hopefully resolved later... (see the homepage how to select plugin right now) You can drag & move codec with the mouse in Config/Decoder window though it's kind of hard work...
- According to this http://www.netbsd.org/Letters/20010803-dolby.html there could be potentially some problems with AC3 decoding routines.
- Debian packages are now split in such a way that user might install only those codecs he really needs (so if you do not want to install extra vorbis libraries you don't have to)
Zdenek Kabelac <kabi@debian.org>