[NTLUG:Discuss] bdest distro for multimedia?

[kbrannen@gte.net]

clayramsey1 at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> anyone got a SuSE review??  their boxed editions at BArnes & Noble looked pretty nicely done.
> 
>>
>>On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 18:10, 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? 

What exactly did you want to know about Suse?  Your question seems a bit 
ambiguous to me.  But I'll make the attempt in light if the thread's topic. :-)

Assuming you get the "Professional" edition (what I have have and recommend), 
everything to need to use MP3's are on the CDs.  To create MP3s, you'll need 
to get Lame and install it, which is very simple to do.  See 
http://lame.sourceforge.net/  I even have a Perl script where I can stick a 
music CD into the drive, and the script will rip all the songs off, convert 
them into MP3s, and tag them with the right album/track name by using CDDB; 
allowing me to shelve the CD so it won't get scratched.

If you prefer the Ogg format, the same sort of thing is doable.

As for DVD, there is no movie DVD player on the Suse CDs.  However, I happen 
to like ogle, see http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/index.shtml  You can 
grab 3 or 4 rpms from there (use the RH rpms) and after installing those, you 
can watch movies (if you have an IDE CDROM, be sure DMA is turned on for your 
device, check out the hdparm command).  As for creating them, I don't know, 
but I'm trying to go there.  Real Soon Now(tm :-) I'm going to get a video 
capture card, then I'll start trying to convert those home movies we've shot 
over the years onto a medium that is easier to watch.  And I'm going to try to 
set up a TIVO like system too. ;-)  (so much to do, so little time :-)

HTH,
Kevin