Real To Plug Windows Media Support Into Linux

I have had that for a few years with Mandriva. It's just a matter of loading the correct libraries and voila, WM support.

Which is why I like them froggy bastidges, among other things.

I've never had a problem with WM, excepting files inflicted with DRM, because it's just a matter of making sure you have the right codec. However, the methods currently available for viewing WM have a debatable legal status. Were Microsoft to decide it might benefit them to make an issue of it, such as if Linux based systems start to offer a serious challenge to the ubiquitousness of Windoze on the desktop, they could make things at least more difficult. People familiar with Linux would still not have much of a problem, but the point would be making it more difficult for those who aren't familiar with Linux, i.e. putting up a roadblock to acceptance of Linux among the average user.

Whether that matters to me or you is basically irrelevant. To the companies and corporations betting their dollars on the FOSS horse, it means a lot, and the fine print shows that's what's going on here. Real Networks has made an agreement with Novell to bundle this player with the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, giving it native support for playing WM. That removes one more stumbling block to the average user's acceptance of Linux on the desktop.

I personally won't be using this because I've never been a fan of Real Networks and am perfectly happy with the method I now use, but I see a potential bright side to this in that it somewhat removes any incentive MS might develop to attacking these other methods.

n/t

I'm not sure about SLED in particular, but the Helix engine, which is the foundation of Real Player under Linux, achieved integration of support for .wmv and .wma files up through version 9. (Those windows media files *requiring* ver. 10 or the new 11 apparently won't play properly.)

Here's some techie news on it:

https://helix-client.helixcommunity.org/2005/devdocs/windowsMedia.html

I read some forums (you can always get the better info from forums) and discovered that it's not fully supporting Windows Media yet. They're still working on the playlist functionality, or so a developer said, and plan to have it out mid-February.