Tech Forum

I am pleased that General Conference is being broadcast on the Internet. ^.^ This allows for an even greater viewing audience than was available via satellite TV.

According to the broadcast page on LDS.org, sessions can be viewed via byu.tv's live feed, or by a Windows Media audio stream. This seems like a good choice, as the software to play either can be freely downloaded on Windows or Mac.

I'm not using Windows or Mac, though. I'm using Linux! There are some cludgy workarounds I could implement, or I could buy the Windows Media codecs from shop.fluendo.com. I wonder if any other streaming audio solutions have been considered, though -- such as RealMedia, which is available on all three platforms? The number of Linux users is growing fast, especially via user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and educational deployments such as the One Laptop Per Child program. It may be helpful to consider how the Church website will accomodate Linux-based visitors.

It does say that conference sessions are available for download in .mp3 format. I don't see a link to this on the conference page, however. Is that only for after the session is over? How can I access these .mp3 files?

I would be very pleased if I could listen to General Conference on my PC -- almost as pleased as if byu.tv offered a Linux-compatible player. ^.^ Many thanks in advance if anyone can help me out here!

We are constantly looking at various video formats to broadcast the conference in. You may want to check out this question / answer on our website. Also, the mp3 link is available after conference has concluded.

Tom

Many thanks!

It the Move Networks Media Player not compatible with Linux? That is what www.byu.tv uses. You have to go a special route to use the Windows Media Player.

I have been able to get streaming audio and video to work with Linux (RedHat and FC). I used a program called mplayer to use the Windows Media streams. It was fairly easy to setup and did require some .dll files for the proper codecs.

BYU has a page all setup for help with Linux: http://www.byutv.org/streaming/linux.asp

thedqs wrote:It the Move Networks Media Player not compatible with Linux? That is what www.byu.tv uses. You have to go a special route to use the Windows Media Player.

From the above-linked page:

"We're sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time:

Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista
(i386) Apple Macintosh OS X or later
(PPC) Apple Macintosh OS X or later

Please check back soon for support for other operating systems."

They said they were working on a Linux player back around June and/or September of 2006. Evidently, progress is not being made very rapidly.

The page at http://www.byutv.org/streaming/linux.asp appears to be helpful, but gmplayer on my fully updated (as of a few days ago) Mandriva 2007.0 system only plays sound and produces the following error message (manually typed, because cut-and-paste isn't available):

"Cannot find codec matching selected -vo and video format 0x33564D57."

It would be helpful if broadcasts could be sent in non-proprietary formats.

Interesting you could not get mplayer working. I just tried it again on a clean machine (FC6) and was able to watch and listen to BYUTV.

Here are my steps:
1. download mplayer source from http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releas ... c1.tar.bz2
2. download all-20061022.tar.bz2 codecs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/release ... 22.tar.bz2
3. bunzip2 both files
4. untar both files using -xf switches
5. made the directory /usr/local/lib/codecs (as root and make sure everyone has read and execute)
6. moved the contents of all-20061022 to /usr/local/lib/codecs
7. configured mplayer source and used the switch --enable-gui
8. make
9. as root: make install
10. (optional) download a skin and installed it to /usr/local/share/mplayer/skins/

Now, when I want to watch BYUTV, I use the command: mplayer mms://windowsmedia2.byu.edu/byutv

If you are having problems with this, check out the documentation that comes with mplayer. There are tons of other features that I didn't select.

Now if I can select something other than the small 160x120 video. My XP machine shows a 320x240 video.

Thanks. It's probably the codecs I would need to install.

What about Ogg Theora for video?

For example, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC / laptop.org) provides Ogg Theora but doesn't include MP3 or other patent problems.

Several video players on many platforms offer Theora support. Even plugins/addons available for popular media players.

I should probably open a different thread ... what about audio instead of MP3 too?

Speex, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis are implementations that compare, are widely available, and don't have potential costs.

Serving these may save money too, due to less licensing costs.

FWIW: my desktop runs NetBSD and I can play the mp3 audios fine with mpg123 and play the wmv videos with mplayer plus the codecs. The selected video codec is: [wmv8] vfm: dshow (Windows Media Video 8). And the audio uses fmpeg (DivX audio v2 (FFmpeg)). I was unable to play the mp4 videos (but I didn't spend anytime trying to try to figure it out.)

See my [thread=685]post here[/thread] about statistics for this web site. I assume that the general public will hold true to these statistics. Many machines (especially running older versions of windows) do not have ogg decoders installed. Most people would not even know how to do that. So although I agree that having ogg available for audio / video would be cool, I'm not sure that the amount of work necessary to do this would justify it at this time. Of course, that is just my opinion.

Tom