Playing webM video files (with Mplayer?) - Linux-audio-user

Robin Gareus

25 Jul 25 Jul

9:34 p.m.

Hi Julien, Update your mplayer and it'll play. webm uses vorbis for audio and matroska for the container. Both have been supported in mplayer for a while. All that is new is the VP8 video-codec. ffmpeg already has support for it (though libwebm and IIRC also some internal decoder); so you could try 'ffplay'. Maybe you just need to update mplayer/ffmpeg/libav* to the latest version of your distribution. And no, it's not YET ANOTHER FORMAT. If things work out it'll become the first /widely used/ royality-free and open codec for video and make it into the HTML5 standard. - well there's a bit more to it, but hey.. no time for love Dr Jones. ciao, robin On Jul 25, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Julien Claassen wrote:

...

Hello everyone! I've just seen, that youtube obviously is encouraging yet another new format on their website. Now it's webM. Is there a simple way to play these files? Again mark one restraint for my setup: It has to be commandline? Kidnest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

Reply

Robin Gareus

10:57 p.m.

Hey Philipp, Your prediction is quite amusing: Either it'll win or it will loose :) But you're right: there won't be much or a grey area: - it'll loose because the video quality is not good-enough - it'll win because it's an open-standard and easy to adopt (HTML5) and the quality if sufficient for web video. ..or it'll really loose because of some patent issue. I'm not aware of a "huge patent war", do you have any pointers? There's always PPL spreading FUD but nothing substantial has turned up [yet]. A good objective analysis (though a bit dated) is http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 The smart thing of google was to add a clause that google allows you to use their patents on VP8 (the webm video codec) if and only if you agree to that you won't sue anyone else with patents you may own related to webm. - Well, it's a bit more complicated in lawyer-speak; and it's a thorn in the flesh of the Free-Software purists. But heck, there are quite a lot of big companies (incl. Cisco, LG, Samsung,..) who have agreed to those terms. ciao, robin On 07/25/2011 10:28 PM, Philipp Überbacher wrote:

...

I can confirm that it works with recent mplayer, although in my case tab completion doesn't work for webm yet. It seems like webm either becomes dominant on the web, maybe even replacing flash to a large extent, or it will vanish. At least that's what I think, there's a huge patent war going on between webm and h.264 supporters. Excerpts from Robin Gareus's message of 2011-07-25 21:33:23 +0200:

Hi Julien, Update your mplayer and it'll play. webm uses vorbis for audio and matroska for the container. Both have been supported in mplayer for a while. All that is new is the VP8 video-codec. ffmpeg already has support for it (though libwebm and IIRC also some internal decoder); so you could try 'ffplay'. Maybe you just need to update mplayer/ffmpeg/libav* to the latest version of your distribution. And no, it's not YET ANOTHER FORMAT. If things work out it'll become the first /widely used/ royality-free and open codec for video and make it into the HTML5 standard. - well there's a bit more to it, but hey.. no time for love Dr Jones. ciao, robin On Jul 25, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Julien Claassen wrote:

Hello everyone! I've just seen, that youtube obviously is encouraging yet another new format on their website. Now it's webM. Is there a simple way to play these files? Again mark one restraint for my setup: It has to be commandline? Kidnest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net the Linux TextBased Studio guide ======= AND MY PERSONAL PAGES AT: ======= http://www.juliencoder.de _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

_______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

Reply

Ken Restivo

30 Jul 30 Jul

8:46 p.m.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 10:46:52PM +0200, Julien Claassen wrote:

...

Hello Rbn! Thanks a lot. I'll update my mplayer then. But youtube said the same about mpeg4 (mp4) a while ago. Well they didn't say, that it would go into the new html5 standard, but they said, that they wanted to switch to it. :-) No discussion here, just to explain, why I said it. Thanks again, very much! It's good to hear, that an open video codec makes it!

Works on Squeeze, does not work on Lenny. I too immediately assumed it was some kind of proprietary Windoze codec, until I looked it up. I hope it gets widely accepted and I'm glad to see Google taking the lead here. -ken

Reply