Gentoo

This friday, there were two driver releases for linux graphics hardware. A new proprietary driver from nvidia and a new free driver for ati cards.

The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.

Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.

The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.

This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.

Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.

If you've been surfing around the internet lately, you probably noticed that videos are often provided via some strange flash-players. That's ugly, because a) you can't download them and b) you need the proprietary flash-plugin. If you have a deeper look into how those flash-stuff works, it's basically just a small applet getting a flv-file (Flash Video) via http. Now, in theory you can use some sniffer like wireshark to get the url or directly the full video. But you'd still need to run the applet in some way.

But there are better solutions, at least for the most common service youtube (google video has recently added download links, so that's fine for now). The URLs are standardized and can be extracted from the page source.

Konqueror users can get this small extension, which will add a context menu for youtube under right click -> actions. Firefox-users can get VideoDownloader (which supports much more video platforms).
As Eiferer noted in the comments, VideoDownloader is SpyWare, so I'd suggest you don't use that. There's another one, based on greasemonkey, here, and, a platform independent bookmarklet here.

Now, playing flv is supported by ffmpeg, so all common linux-players should be able to play them. Thus you can get those videos and play them without using any proprietary software.

Thanks to Kostya, ffmpeg now supports the VC-1 codec, which is also used in Microsofts WMV9-format.

In the past, for Linux-users it was only possible to play those videos with win32codecs, which use proprietary windows-dlls and don't work on non-x86-platforms. With this improvement, one of the most common multimedia-formats unsupported by free software can now be played with all major free players (as ffmpeg is used by vlc, xine, mplayer, totem and many others).

Congrats to the ffmpeg-guys. The easiest way to get stuff playing is getting mplayer from svn (I used the mplayer-svn-ebuild from this Multimedia Overlay with some small modifications).

(via Breaking Eggs and making Omelettes)