[NTLUG:Discuss] bdest distro for multimedia?

[Chris Cox]

Clay Ramsey wrote:
> by this I mean playing DVDs, MP3s, and running the variouis animations
> seen in media players.... on the Intel platform
> Mandrake?  Debian?  SuSE? 

Both Red Hat (Fedora) and SUSE will have some problems with all of this
out of the box.  However, there are some well known sites
that have the additional software or instructions on how
to get the software onto your system.

For SUSE, I like http://packman.links2linux.org
For Fedora, rpm.livna.org (I don't use Red Hat... just know this
is where you get the packages from)

Mplayer has become the swiss army knife product to have.
I still use xine though.... If you plane to RIP DVDs, having
Mplayer is a good idea... many DVD rippers use the transcode
module which I believe is a part of Mplayer.

Packages you'll need are:

Mplayer or xine (ogle is also an option) for DVD playing....
   if configured correctly with ALL packages, it will handle
   ALL media types including MP3, WMV, MOV, etc.

DVD::rip for DVD ripping (requires Mplayer probably)

LAME for MP3 encoding.

mpg123 or mpg321 for playing MP3.. or use xmms or xine above.

I usually build the full blown xine from packman for SUSE 9
including the Mozilla plugin.  This works well.

I usually have to search for LAME.. once installed, Konqueror
is automatically ready to rip songs from CDs into MP3s via
a simple drag-and-drop operation.