Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [164]
KDE
KDE is the K Desktop Environment, covered in Chapter 3. In the area of multimedia , KDE offers the following:
A sound mixer (KMix )
A sound recorder (Krec )
Various media players supporting sound and video (Noatun, Juk, Kaboodle, Kaffeine, and others)
A CD player (KsCD )
A MIDI player (KMid )
An audio CD ripping and encoding utility (KAudioCreator )
A sound effects construction tool (artsbuilder )
Because the applications are all part of the same desktop environment, there is tight integration between applications. For example, the KDE web browser, Konqueror, can play audio and video files, and KDE applications can play sounds to notify the user of important events.
The multimedia support in KDE is based on aRts, the analog real-time synthesizer. Part of aRts is the sound server, artsd, which manages all sound output so that multiple applications can play sounds simultaneously. The sound server communicates with the underlying operating system's sound drivers, either OSS or ALSA on Linux.
There are also many KDE multimedia applications that are not officially part of the KDE release either because they are not yet of release quality or they are maintained as separate projects. The former can often be found in the kdenonbeta area of the KDE project. The latter can usually be found by using an index site such as http://freshmeat.net or http://www.kde-apps.org.
GNOME
GNOME is another free desktop project, covered in Chapter 3. Like KDE, GNOME offers a sound mixer, sound recorder, CD player, and various media player applications. Multimedia support is integrated into Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. GNOME uses the esd sound server to share sound resources among applications.
A problem when running a mixed environment of KDE and GNOME applications is that the sound servers can conflict when using sound resources. At the time of writing, both the KDE and GNOME projects were not totally satisfied with their sound server implementation and were having discussions to develop a replacement that could be shared between KDE and GNOME. This would finally make it possible to run KDE and GNOME multimedia applications at the same time without resource conflicts.
Windows Compatibility
The Wine project is a technology that allows running many Windows applications directly on Linux. It is covered in detail in Chapter 28. Some commercial multimedia applications run under Wine.
The commercial version of Wine from CodeWeavers called CrossOver supports a number of multimedia applications, including Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, the Windows Media Player, and web browser plug-ins for QuickTime, Flash, and ShockWave.
TransGaming Technologies offers Cedega, which is optimized for running Windows games that require DirectX support. It is based on an alternate version of Wine known as ReWind, that has less restrictive licensing terms than Wine.
Some multimedia applications, such as MPlayer, can leverage Wine technology to directly load some Windows DLLs, providing support for proprietary codecs.
Multimedia Applications
Once you have your hardware configured under Linux, you'll want to run some multimedia applications. So many are available for Linux that they can't possibly be listed here, so we instead describe some of the general categories of programs that are available and list some popular representative applications. You can look for applications using the references listed at the end of the chapter. Toward the end of the chapter, you will also find more in-depth descriptions of some popular or particularly useful applications.
These are the major categories of multimedia