Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [175]
If I want to listen to them on my computer, I can use Juk to arrange them in playlists of my favorite programs arranged by type and have hours of continuous music or radio shows. I can save the MP3 files to my portable MP3 player to listen to when I am away from the computer, or burn them to a CD to listen to with a portable CD player.
Using a low-power AM transmitter, I can legally broadcast programming throughout my home. An inexpensive AM transmitter is available from a number of sources and connects either to the sound card output of my computer or a CD player, and can broadcast vintage radio programs on the AM band to radios within the house. Now when I turn on that old radio, I can hear Burns and Allen, The Shadow, or some swing music from the 1940s. I might even be able to convince the more gullible visitors to my radio room that old radios can still pick up old radio programs.
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[*] You may add your own categories if the ones described do not fit your usage of KimDaBa.
Multimedia Toolkits and Development Environments
KDE and GNOME have already been discussed. They provide basic support for graphics and sound that can be used for multimedia applications if they are not too demanding. If you want to do more, or if KDE or GNOME does not fit your needs, there are other toolkits available that are worth considering. This section briefly mentions some of the more popular multimedia toolkits and libraries available for Linux.
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL )
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL , and 2D video framebuffers. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award-winning Linux port of Civilization: Call to Power.
SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.
The project home page is http://www.libsdl.org.
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standardized API for 2D and 3D graphics programming developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). It supports rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. More information can be found at http://www.opengl.org.
There are several free implementations of OpenGL support under Linux. The most popular is Mesa. Because it is not licensed from SGI, it cannot officially be called OpenGL, but it is designed to be compatible. The Mesa project home page is http://www.mesa3d.org.
OpenAL
OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications. Conceptually, you can think of OpenAL as a 3D rendering library for audio just as OpenGL is a 3D rendering library for graphics.
The project's home page is http://www.openal.org.
JACK
JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX-conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple's OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (i.e., as normal applications), or they can run within the JACK server (i.e., as a plug-in).
The JACK home page is http://jackit.sourceforge.net.
GStreamer
GStreamer is a library that allows the construction of graphs of media-handling components, ranging from simple sound file playback to complex audio mixing and video nonlinear editing. Applications can take advantage of advances in codec and filter technology transparently. Developers can add new codecs and filters by writing a simple plug-in with a clean, generic interface.
The GStreamer web site is http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org.