I'm forsaking Microsoft for Opensource

davidmoore · 3rd April 2009, 05:29

Changing to Linux. I've always used Microsoft Windows as my OS of choice, but I think I'm going to switch over to open source. I've always enjoyed that the fact that everything is compatible with Windows which makes me a little weary of switching to Linux. Maybe my facts are wrong, but whatever, I'm ready to take the plunge now. I just don't know which distro I should go with because there are so many. I'm not really too worried about getting a distro just because it's easier for the newb, I just want a good one I can use for video playback, transcoding and storage. As well as media center applications. I'm not sure what information you all will need in order to accurately recommend which distro for me. So throw me some questions and I'll be happy to answer them. Thank you.

oldcpu · 3rd April 2009, 06:58

There are many good distributions. If it were me in your shoes, and if I had a friend who lived nearby who used Linux, I would initially pick the same distribution as them (assuming they were willing to help). A friend can significantly reduce the time it takes you to come up to speed. It WILL be frustrating and painful initially, and stubbornness not to give up and a lot of patience will be the qualities that serve you best in trying to get through the initial learning period.

Other than that, the Linux world is your Oyster, and take a pick. I use openSUSE myself (and like its multimedia support) but I have friends who like debian based distributions.

Visit some of the Linux distribution's forums, and maybe see if there is one that has a community that you feel comfortable in.

Here is a link to some basic Linux concepts (written from an openSUSE perspective, but it is mostly applicable to many other Linux distributions): http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts

In openSUSE, we tend to get many of our 3rd party packaged applications from the Packman packagers: http://packman.links2linux.de/ The custom search tab on that page works great.

There are also other places from which to get applications packaged for openSUSE (the webpin search for openSUSE works well): http://packages.opensuse-community.org/

But in truth, Linux is Linux, and what can be done on one distribution can likely be done on another. It usually boils down to how much effort, and how familiar one is with one distribution's way of doing things.

skottish · 3rd April 2009, 19:14

Some questions that are good to ask yourself in the beginning is do you want to understand Linux? Do you want to take control of your system? Do you want things "to just work"? These are useful things to think about before you get too deep into one or another.

I use 64 bit Arch Linux ( http://www.archlinux.org ). It's a distro that's optimized for i686 and x86_64 processors, has one of the best package managers in existence, has one of the best user communities that you will find ( http://bbs.archlinux.org ), is easy to customize your own packages, and has Ranguvar as a user!!! The latter alone is enough for everyone to come on board.

One of the great strengths of Arch is that it's a rolling release. Packages are constantly updated as they become available. The only software that sits in the 'testing' repo for long is stuff that's known be a tricky update (xorg-server 1.6 for instance). Generally speaking though, you don't have to wait long for anything.

If anyone decides to install Arch, read through the excellent Beginner's Guide before you get started:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide

jason50146 · 3rd April 2009, 21:54

In my opinion - the greatest strength of open source Linux-based distros is also their greatest weakness - there are an almost insane number of options available to you. With windows you only have one choice, so you go with what Bill sells you. With Linux, you need to hold on to your seat because it isn't always obvious which of the many paths is correct for you. Your question could elicit a dozen responses, each with different answers. My post will be no different. Linux will offer you a direct replacement for most windows applications, so the changeover is not as painful as it used to be.

MythTV would be a Media Portal or Media Center type application, although it's not quite as developed. MPlayer and VLC seem to be the most popular media players. I use Handbrake for encoding, although mencoder is a popular CLI based option. These will be available for most any distro you select. Some distros are built around MythTV.

My story-

I've been using Ubuntu for about 2 years now. I don't miss windows much. I do boot Vista into a virtual machine to run AnyDVD, but nothing else ties me to windows. I don't do any "power" computing. I surf the net, listen to music, watch YouTube, and encode a movie or two.

If you want to dig a little deeper, but don't want to control the entire experience, Ubuntu works well. It needs some setting up out of the box, but is a good learning experience. Ubuntu has a huge user community and a large software repository.

If you would rather things "just worked", I would look at LinuxMint, which is just Ubuntu with all the bells and whistles pre-installed.

I've tried other distros and always go back to Ubuntu. I don't know if it's my hardware, but other distros always seem to have one problem or another. I've played around with OpenSolaris (actually is Unix, not Linux), which seems to have a lot of potential, but is a little new and limited at this time.

I've included some useful links below. Enjoy.

http://distrowatch.com/
http://www.ubuntu.com
http://ubuntuforums.org/
http://www.linuxmint.com
http://www.mythtv.com
http://www.mythbuntu.com/

nm · 3rd April 2009, 23:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason50146

MythTV would be a Media Portal or Media Center type application, although it's not quite as developed. MPlayer and VLC seem to be the most popular media players.

XBMC also deserves a mention in the Media Center context. Its UI is visually top-class and the media player functionality is pretty good, especially now with VDPAU support. The Linux version of XBMC is packaged officially for Ubuntu only (I think -- haven't checked lately), but it should compile on most distributions. Debian-based distros might be easier since there are good instructions for them.

Quote:

I use Handbrake for encoding, although mencoder is a popular CLI based option. These will be available for most any distro you select.

And MPlayer is best when served fresh from the SVN, so you may want to build it yourself. Development of MPlayer and especially FFmpeg goes on steadily all the time but official releases don't happen often. SVN is rarely more broken than the previous release. SMPlayer is an excellent interface for MPlayer if you don't want to learn the command-line switches by heart.

Avidemux is a nice encoding frontend and Virtualdub-like video editor. It has more filters than HandBrake and supports more complex operations.

qyot27 · 4th April 2009, 19:02

Also, it's not intrinsically necessary to leap totally into one or another OS. The pain involved in learning how to use Linux can be lessened by dual-booting (not to mention it gives better performance than a virtual machine would). I know that Ubuntu's installer offers to set up a dual-boot environment for you, although I don't know about other distros - Ubuntu was simply the first distro that I tried that played nice with my own machine (after testing Knoppix and Slax LiveCDs, both of which spazzed out on me if I ran them on my own computer, although they worked fine on my parents' and grandparents' setups), so I've just stuck with it. Been using it - off and on* - since version 5.10.

*I took it off for a while after the upgrade to 6.10 or 7.04, can't remember which, since the display settings went weird (turns out the default Hz value setting changed; putting it back at 60Hz more or less corrected it, although I still have to use xvidtune to shift it a couple jumps to the right every time I log in; I really hope I can find a permanent solution for that, as editing xorg seems to do squat).

On media playback I generally stick with SMPlayer for video and Audacious for audio, which mirrors the way I have it set up on Windows (where I use WMP6.4 or Media Player Classic for video and Winamp 2.95 for audio).

smok3 · 4th April 2009, 21:16

i have some really limited experience, but for the desktop i would go with either linuxmint or opensuse.
p.s. As for the helpful community, until you do simple things a lot of irc channels will do just fine, but when you start doing something more drastic, you will have to become google king (last time i got stuck with how to limit the ssh account(s) for example...).

p.s. you can easily try some via http://www.virtualbox.org/

jason50146 · 5th April 2009, 01:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by qyot27

Also, it's not intrinsically necessary to leap totally into one or another OS. The pain involved in learning how to use Linux can be lessened by dual-booting

I second the dual boot recommendation. I dual booted for a while too.

Installing a dual boot system isn't without quirks though. My experience is that it is always easier to install Linux on a system with Windows rather than the other way around. There is lots of info about this on the web.

The newer versions of Ubuntu support installation from inside Windows. This may be an even better option for a newcomer. I have never tried it. Google "wubi".

oldcpu · 5th April 2009, 07:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by qyot27

I know that Ubuntu's installer offers to set up a dual-boot environment for you, although I don't know about other distros

Installation menu's to allow dual booting is pretty much standard in all distributions. Red Hat/Fedora, Mandriva, PC Linux, openSUSE, ... etc ... all have installation menus to allow an easy setup of dual booting.

davidmoore · 5th April 2009, 12:52

Thanks for all the great recommendations. I went with Ubuntu and I'm liking it so far. I'm not sure what to do about playback though. I used CCCP with MPC and CoreAVC 1.9.5. Is there a way to install these codecs on linux, especially CoreAVC?

Sharktooth · 5th April 2009, 13:54

no. add the medibuntu repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list (or do it the "graphical way" in synaptic).
once you added it, refresh (or apt-get update) the package list and install mplayer (i'd recommend SMplayer though) or even VLC.

davidmoore · 5th April 2009, 23:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sharktooth

no. add the medibuntu repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list (or do it the "graphical way" in synaptic).
once you added it, refresh (or apt-get update) the package list and install mplayer (i'd recommend SMplayer though) or even VLC.

The instructions to that site didn't work exactly, but i found a way around it, i believe i have it now though.

It's kind of fun using the terminal to do all the configurations. I use CLIs when configuring routers and pix's and such. It's annoying at the same time too. lol.

Amato · 5th April 2009, 23:56

CoreAVC can be used on Linux but it's not as easy as a simple apt-get.

coreavc-for-linux

Sharktooth · 6th April 2009, 03:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidmoore

The instructions to that site didn't work exactly, but i found a way around it, i believe i have it now though.

It's kind of fun using the terminal to do all the configurations. I use CLIs when configuring routers and pix's and such. It's annoying at the same time too. lol.

you dont have to do it with the terminal.
you can also add the repository using synaptic...

davidmoore · 6th April 2009, 08:02

I installed vlc and it appears to be working just fine.

only reason i used coreavc is because it's multithreaded

anyone have any suggestions for guis? i'm using gnome now, i guess it works just fine. but it will need to support 1920 x 1080 resolution since i use my tv as a monitor.

nm · 6th April 2009, 09:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidmoore

only reason i used coreavc is because it's multithreaded

It is possible to build MPlayer (and other players that use FFmpeg libraries) with ffmpeg-mt, which has a multithreaded H.264 decoder.
Again, this is not as easy as using apt-get/synaptic, but if you want to watch high-bitrate 1080p video, you may need a faster decoder than the current FFmpeg/libavcodec. If you have an NVIDIA GPU (GeForce 8 or newer), you could also use VDPAU.

There are some good tips and links at MPlayerHQ news section, 2009-02-20: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

Quote:

anyone have any suggestions for guis? i'm using gnome now, i guess it works just fine. but it will need to support 1920 x 1080 resolution since i use my tv as a monitor.

That is determined by X.org configuration and the graphics driver you use. GNOME and other desktop environments run fine at any resolution.

davidmoore · 6th April 2009, 10:10

I have a 8800 GTS card currently. I'll check out that VDPAU and MPlayerHQ.

nm · 6th April 2009, 10:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidmoore

I have a 8800 GTS card currently. I'll check out that VDPAU and MPlayerHQ.

Is it the older G80 model (320/640 MB) or G92 (512/1024MB)? VDPAU doesn't work with G80 cards since they only have VP1 video decoder, not VP2/3.

davidmoore · 6th April 2009, 23:10

640mb.

Sharktooth · 7th April 2009, 18:05

doh!... then you definatly need ffmpeg-mt branch libavcodec.

3rd April 2009, 05:29	#1 \| Link
davidmoore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 30	I'm forsaking Microsoft for Opensource Changing to Linux. I've always used Microsoft Windows as my OS of choice, but I think I'm going to switch over to open source. I've always enjoyed that the fact that everything is compatible with Windows which makes me a little weary of switching to Linux. Maybe my facts are wrong, but whatever, I'm ready to take the plunge now. I just don't know which distro I should go with because there are so many. I'm not really too worried about getting a distro just because it's easier for the newb, I just want a good one I can use for video playback, transcoding and storage. As well as media center applications. I'm not sure what information you all will need in order to accurately recommend which distro for me. So throw me some questions and I'll be happy to answer them. Thank you. Last edited by Guest; 3rd April 2009 at 14:24. Reason: rule 12

3rd April 2009, 06:58	#2 \| Link
oldcpu oldcpu Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Europe Posts: 83	Flip a coin ... There are many good distributions. If it were me in your shoes, and if I had a friend who lived nearby who used Linux, I would initially pick the same distribution as them (assuming they were willing to help). A friend can significantly reduce the time it takes you to come up to speed. It WILL be frustrating and painful initially, and stubbornness not to give up and a lot of patience will be the qualities that serve you best in trying to get through the initial learning period. Other than that, the Linux world is your Oyster, and take a pick. I use openSUSE myself (and like its multimedia support) but I have friends who like debian based distributions. Visit some of the Linux distribution's forums, and maybe see if there is one that has a community that you feel comfortable in. Here is a link to some basic Linux concepts (written from an openSUSE perspective, but it is mostly applicable to many other Linux distributions): http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts In openSUSE, we tend to get many of our 3rd party packaged applications from the Packman packagers: http://packman.links2linux.de/ The custom search tab on that page works great. There are also other places from which to get applications packaged for openSUSE (the webpin search for openSUSE works well): http://packages.opensuse-community.org/ But in truth, Linux is Linux, and what can be done on one distribution can likely be done on another. It usually boils down to how much effort, and how familiar one is with one distribution's way of doing things. __________________ Intel Core i7 920, 4GB DDR3-1600, ASUS P6T Deluxe V2, Nvidia GTX-260, openSUSE-11.1 Last edited by oldcpu; 3rd April 2009 at 07:12.

3rd April 2009, 19:14	#3 \| Link
skottish Registered User Join Date: Feb 2007 Posts: 43	Some questions that are good to ask yourself in the beginning is do you want to understand Linux? Do you want to take control of your system? Do you want things "to just work"? These are useful things to think about before you get too deep into one or another. I use 64 bit Arch Linux ( http://www.archlinux.org ). It's a distro that's optimized for i686 and x86_64 processors, has one of the best package managers in existence, has one of the best user communities that you will find ( http://bbs.archlinux.org ), is easy to customize your own packages, and has Ranguvar as a user!!! The latter alone is enough for everyone to come on board. One of the great strengths of Arch is that it's a rolling release. Packages are constantly updated as they become available. The only software that sits in the 'testing' repo for long is stuff that's known be a tricky update (xorg-server 1.6 for instance). Generally speaking though, you don't have to wait long for anything. If anyone decides to install Arch, read through the excellent Beginner's Guide before you get started: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide Last edited by skottish; 3rd April 2009 at 19:32.

3rd April 2009, 21:54	#4 \| Link
jason50146 Registered User Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 19	In my opinion - the greatest strength of open source Linux-based distros is also their greatest weakness - there are an almost insane number of options available to you. With windows you only have one choice, so you go with what Bill sells you. With Linux, you need to hold on to your seat because it isn't always obvious which of the many paths is correct for you. Your question could elicit a dozen responses, each with different answers. My post will be no different. Linux will offer you a direct replacement for most windows applications, so the changeover is not as painful as it used to be. MythTV would be a Media Portal or Media Center type application, although it's not quite as developed. MPlayer and VLC seem to be the most popular media players. I use Handbrake for encoding, although mencoder is a popular CLI based option. These will be available for most any distro you select. Some distros are built around MythTV. My story- I've been using Ubuntu for about 2 years now. I don't miss windows much. I do boot Vista into a virtual machine to run AnyDVD, but nothing else ties me to windows. I don't do any "power" computing. I surf the net, listen to music, watch YouTube, and encode a movie or two. If you want to dig a little deeper, but don't want to control the entire experience, Ubuntu works well. It needs some setting up out of the box, but is a good learning experience. Ubuntu has a huge user community and a large software repository. If you would rather things "just worked", I would look at LinuxMint, which is just Ubuntu with all the bells and whistles pre-installed. I've tried other distros and always go back to Ubuntu. I don't know if it's my hardware, but other distros always seem to have one problem or another. I've played around with OpenSolaris (actually is Unix, not Linux), which seems to have a lot of potential, but is a little new and limited at this time. I've included some useful links below. Enjoy. http://distrowatch.com/ http://www.ubuntu.com http://ubuntuforums.org/ http://www.linuxmint.com http://www.mythtv.com http://www.mythbuntu.com/ Last edited by jason50146; 3rd April 2009 at 21:58.

4th April 2009, 21:16	#7 \| Link
smok3 brontosaurusrex Join Date: Oct 2001 Posts: 2,392	i have some really limited experience, but for the desktop i would go with either linuxmint or opensuse. p.s. As for the helpful community, until you do simple things a lot of irc channels will do just fine, but when you start doing something more drastic, you will have to become google king (last time i got stuck with how to limit the ssh account(s) for example...). p.s. you can easily try some via http://www.virtualbox.org/ __________________ certain other member Last edited by smok3; 4th April 2009 at 21:40.

4th April 2009, 19:02	#6 \| Link
qyot27 ...? Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Florida Posts: 1,420	Also, it's not intrinsically necessary to leap totally into one or another OS. The pain involved in learning how to use Linux can be lessened by dual-booting (not to mention it gives better performance than a virtual machine would). I know that Ubuntu's installer offers to set up a dual-boot environment for you, although I don't know about other distros - Ubuntu was simply the first distro that I tried that played nice with my own machine (after testing Knoppix and Slax LiveCDs, both of which spazzed out on me if I ran them on my own computer, although they worked fine on my parents' and grandparents' setups), so I've just stuck with it. Been using it - off and on* - since version 5.10. *I took it off for a while after the upgrade to 6.10 or 7.04, can't remember which, since the display settings went weird (turns out the default Hz value setting changed; putting it back at 60Hz more or less corrected it, although I still have to use xvidtune to shift it a couple jumps to the right every time I log in; I really hope I can find a permanent solution for that, as editing xorg seems to do squat). On media playback I generally stick with SMPlayer for video and Audacious for audio, which mirrors the way I have it set up on Windows (where I use WMP6.4 or Media Player Classic for video and Winamp 2.95 for audio).

5th April 2009, 12:52	#10 \| Link
davidmoore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 30	Thanks for all the great recommendations. I went with Ubuntu and I'm liking it so far. I'm not sure what to do about playback though. I used CCCP with MPC and CoreAVC 1.9.5. Is there a way to install these codecs on linux, especially CoreAVC?

5th April 2009, 13:54	#11 \| Link
Sharktooth Mr. Sandman Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Haddonfield, IL Posts: 11,768	no. add the medibuntu repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list (or do it the "graphical way" in synaptic). once you added it, refresh (or apt-get update) the package list and install mplayer (i'd recommend SMplayer though) or even VLC. __________________ MPEG-4 ASP Custom Matrices: EQM V1(old), EQM AutoGK Sharpmatrix (aka EQM V2), EQM V3HR (updated 01/10/2004), EQM V3LR, EQM V3ULR (updated 04/02/2005), EQM V3UHR (updated 17/12/2004) and EQM V3EHR (updated 05/10/2004) Info about my ASP matrices. MPEG-4 AVC Custom Matrices: EQM AVC-HR Info about my AVC matrices My x264 builds. Mooo!!!

5th April 2009, 23:56	#13 \| Link
Amato Registered User Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 7	CoreAVC can be used on Linux but it's not as easy as a simple apt-get. coreavc-for-linux

6th April 2009, 08:02	#15 \| Link
davidmoore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 30	I installed vlc and it appears to be working just fine. only reason i used coreavc is because it's multithreaded anyone have any suggestions for guis? i'm using gnome now, i guess it works just fine. but it will need to support 1920 x 1080 resolution since i use my tv as a monitor.

6th April 2009, 10:10	#17 \| Link
davidmoore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 30	I have a 8800 GTS card currently. I'll check out that VDPAU and MPlayerHQ.

6th April 2009, 23:10	#19 \| Link
davidmoore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 30	640mb.

7th April 2009, 18:05	#20 \| Link
Sharktooth Mr. Sandman Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Haddonfield, IL Posts: 11,768	doh!... then you definatly need ffmpeg-mt branch libavcodec. __________________ MPEG-4 ASP Custom Matrices: EQM V1(old), EQM AutoGK Sharpmatrix (aka EQM V2), EQM V3HR (updated 01/10/2004), EQM V3LR, EQM V3ULR (updated 04/02/2005), EQM V3UHR (updated 17/12/2004) and EQM V3EHR (updated 05/10/2004) Info about my ASP matrices. MPEG-4 AVC Custom Matrices: EQM AVC-HR Info about my AVC matrices My x264 builds. Mooo!!!

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