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Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: Ice-9 on 5 October 2002, 20:53

Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Ice-9 on 5 October 2002, 20:53
I'm downloading 8.0 at the moment, gonna install it in about an hour or two.
Now, it seems Redhat removed support for mp3 due to some licensing problems.

I went to xmms.org and downloaded a plugin needed for playing mp3's in RH 8.0 but do I need to download Xmms too or does RH have it on the cd's and I just have to enable mp3 support with the plugin?

Thanks.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 5 October 2002, 21:04
??? are they jumping on the copy protection bandwagon as well? or are they just going along for the ride?

i shouldn't imagine you'll have any problems. If i were you i would just wait till you've installed red hat and then download musicmatch jukebox for it, which is 13Mb, and does all the stuff that XMMS does and more (like ripping CDs and stuff too)
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: TheQuirk on 5 October 2002, 21:06
No, they announced they won't include mp3 support because the company that holds the license to mp3 decided to charge money.. There used to be a slashdot article about that...
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Ice-9 on 5 October 2002, 21:15
quote:
If i were you i would just wait till you've installed red hat and then download musicmatch jukebox for it, which is 13Mb, and does all the stuff that XMMS does and more (like ripping CDs and stuff too)


I didn't know that Musicmatch released a linux version of its software, thanks for mentioning that to me   (http://smile.gif)  
I always thought of Musicmatch to be pretty cool software ad it would be a relief to be able to use it in Linux.

[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: Ice9 ]

Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 5 October 2002, 21:47
quote:
Originally posted by Ice9:
I'm downloading 8.0 at the moment, gonna install it in about an hour or two.
Now, it seems Redhat removed support for mp3 due to some licensing problems.

I went to xmms.org and downloaded a plugin needed for playing mp3's in RH 8.0 but do I need to download Xmms too or does RH have it on the cd's and I just have to enable mp3 support with the plugin?

Thanks.



XMMS is actually the default audio player in RH8.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: XxD on 5 October 2002, 22:50
it comes wif mandrake too.

i like it~
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 6 October 2002, 00:58
however xmms (at least my copy) does not fully support the editing of id3v2 tags. Can anybody tell me if this is supported in the most recent versions?
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Ice-9 on 6 October 2002, 02:35
Which version do you use?
Mine is 1.2.6 and it doesn't support it.
Don't know what it's good for though, what do the id3v2 tags do?
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: TheQuirk on 6 October 2002, 11:39
http://xmms.org/ (http://xmms.org/) - read the second news post  (http://tongue.gif)

If you are using Redhat 8 and the supplied RPMS of XMMS you will find that it is not
possible to load any mp3 files. Redhat was supposed to have a placeholder plugin informing you of the change, but that seems to have gone missing.
Available >> <a href="http://soraas.student.nlh.no/~havardk/xmms/xmms-1.2.7-rh8-rpm/">here</a> << is some additional information and a mpg123 RPM for Redhat 8 installation of XMMS.
Hopefully, I've made myself clear on this subject, since Redhat apparently failed to get their message through.
Note to Notting: egg->face
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 6 October 2002, 11:47
I find the third post more interesting:

 
quote:

Statement from Thomson Multimedia, mp3 Licensing Aug 29, 2002 In a posting appearing Tuesday August 27, 2002 on the Web site 'slashdot.org,' an individual cited a change in the mp3 license fee structure of Thomson and Fraunhofer. The writer of the post apparently misread the mp3 licensing conditions, as Thomson's mp3 licensing policy has not experienced any change.

To clarify, since the beginning of our mp3 licensing program in 1995, Thomson has never charged a per unit royalty for freely distributed software decoders. For commercially sold decoders - primarily hardware mp3 players - the per-unit royalty has always been in place since the beginning of the program.

Therefore, there is no change in our licensing policy and we continue to believe that the royalty fees of .75 cents per mp3 player (on average selling over $200 dollars) has no measurable impact on the consumer experience.

Stefan Geyersberger
Business Manager - Audio & Multimedia



Which to me appears that MP3 technology may not be as bad as we had feared. Apparently the licensing has not changed and the open free source versions are not meant to be included in the royalty. Adding mpg321 to RedHat took all of 5 seconds. I wonder if RedHat will again include it in future releases based on the quoted post?
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 6 October 2002, 15:41
quote:
Originally posted by Ice9:
Which version do you use?
Mine is 1.2.6 and it doesn't support it.
Don't know what it's good for though, what do the id3v2 tags do?



id3v1 tags contain six fields of text which can contain info about who the mp3 is by and what it's called et c. The fields are of limited size. id3v2 has more fields and they can be longer. XMMS reads id3v2 tags but will only write id3v1 tags, which means that if you edit a tag, xmms will still display the old info and there's nothing you can do about it. this really pisses me of. Why they have not fixed it i do not know. perhaps it is because xmms is only a frontend for mpg123? maybe it only supports id3v1?

anyway, if nobody knows the answer then i would rather not hog this topic since it is actually about red hat and copy protection.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Ice-9 on 6 October 2002, 16:13
Well, I installed the plugin for RH 8.0 and took a look at the file info while playing an mp3, version 1.2.7 of Xmms still doesn' support id3v2 tags apparently.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 6 October 2002, 21:33
quote:
Originally posted by Calum:


id3v1 tags contain six fields of text which can contain info about who the mp3 is by and what it's called et c. The fields are of limited size. id3v2 has more fields and they can be longer. XMMS reads id3v2 tags but will only write id3v1 tags, which means that if you edit a tag, xmms will still display the old info and there's nothing you can do about it. this really pisses me of. Why they have not fixed it i do not know. perhaps it is because xmms is only a frontend for mpg123? maybe it only supports id3v1?



Calum, if you can't edit your id3v2 tags within any of your graphical players have you tried this (http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/)?

It's a little more trouble than doing it right in the player but it looks like you should be able to add/modify the id3v2 tags with this utility.

Hope this helps.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 6 October 2002, 23:27
And a note about getting id3v2 to work. You'll need id3lib. If you are on the new RedHat which comes with gcc v3.2 you'll need to get the id3lib-stable from CVS at http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/ (http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/) in order to get it to compile. The tar.gz file will not work as it is incompatible with gcc v3.2.

Also if you do a default "configure;make;make install" from the CVS source it will install in /usr/local/lib which means you need to add "/usr/local/lib" to /etc/ld.so.conf  if it isn't already in there and then run /sbin/ldconf. Then you will be able to compile the id3v2 utility. I just used it and it seems to work just fine.

[ October 06, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: flap on 7 October 2002, 00:10
quote:
Originally posted by Calum:
anyway, if nobody knows the answer then i would rather not hog this topic since it is actually about red hat and copy protection.


not to be pedantic, but the mp3 issue is actually about software patents, not copy protection.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 12 January 2003, 18:50
well i just don't see how red hat can't include the mp3 plugin for free but xmms.org can. eh?
i just experienced this issue first hand and it confused me for a minute till i remembered this thread... i bet a lot of newbies (who always try red hat first) will be finding this mp3 thing annoying too and not knowing what to do about it.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: KernelPanic on 12 January 2003, 18:52
quote:
Originally posted by Calum:
well i just don't see how red hat can't include the mp3 plugin for free but xmms.org can. eh?
i just experienced this issue first hand and it confused me for a minute till i remembered this thread... i bet a lot of newbies (who always try red hat first) will be finding this mp3 thing annoying too and not knowing what to do about it.



ReHat could have included the mp3 plugin but they were worried about legal action due to the silly patent issues that are going on. I suppose it has been a minor annoyance to people but I suppose it's better than RedHat getting it's ass sued.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 12 January 2003, 20:57
suppose so, and i just noticed void main's reply about id3 tags! thanks void main! i will get that right now!
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: flap on 13 January 2003, 00:35
Hopefully this sort of thing will help to get people thinking about using the technically superior, patent free ogg format instead. Obviously you can't do anything about other people encoding files as mp3s, but if you're encoding yourself you should really use ogg.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 13 January 2003, 01:12
that's fine if you are filesharing with your friends, but say i want to host my own music for promotional purposes to get people to download it. if i say 'free mp3s' i bet more people download them and hear them than if i said 'free ogg vorbis files!'.

that said, i agree with you entirely!
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: flap on 13 January 2003, 01:24
Well you could just say "Free music".
And remember, it's not just an issue of freedom - oggs sound better and are smaller than mp3s.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 13 January 2003, 01:36
I agree that Ogg is the way to go. And don't the most popular players support it (winamp)? You could make both formats available along with a note about Ogg's superiority (politically and technically).

A note about Red Hat. I believe it was more of a timing issue. I am pretty sure they had the MP3 libraries included with the 8.0 betas but right at final release time it became an issue and they decided to pull it. Shortly after that time I believe the patent holders have come out and said that it would have been ok to include it. I am curious if these libraries are included in the 8.1 beta. I bet there is a good chance you will see them back in 8.1.
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: Calum on 13 January 2003, 14:14
well, at the moment i'm more concerned with the physical mechanics of putting all that stuff back in than whether it'll be in in future. in a way it's good since it makes me think about stuff and how to get it to work.  (http://smile.gif)
Title: Redhat 8.0 & Mp3
Post by: voidmain on 13 January 2003, 21:45
In my experience all that stuff relating to MP3 amounted to nothing more than 1 or 2 RPMs that were installed in a matter of seconds.