Multimedia support

[martosurf]

Guys,

how well is multimedia support in Lucid? I'm having a VERY HARD TIME to make Karmic play all type of multimedia including DVDs -open and encrypted-, .RMVB and such files, some of them playing video ok but with not audio and so on.

Yes, I installed Medibuntu stuff etc, but still have to use one program to play DVDs and another to play video files with subtitles (and don't mention how ugly DVD subtitle fonts are, the same which look cool otherwise in every other app). And worst of all FLASH HAVE NO AUDIO in Mozilla nor in Chrome nor in Konqueror.

I'm fed up with this problems. Tried other KDE 4 x64 distros -openSUSE, Sabayon, Linux Mint- and I still prefer Kubuntu, you devs are cool, I love the way you customize it, but these multimedia errors are a real egg's pain.

So far I'm fed up that I'm considering switching back to Ubuntu where everything runned smooth from the start, but you know what, I found the KDE4 and Kubuntu fan in me and I'm seriously waiting for Lucid to see how much and how all of these things are addressed. I hope Lucid will ship with KDE 4.4.2 or something else becasue 4.4 needs a bit more of polish at this time.

Anxious to hear about you people, thanks!

[verndog]

Re: Multimedia support

Did you read the Ubuntu forums Comprehensive Multimedia & Video Howto ?

It worked for me. If you had problems there's over 100 pages of reading

[Zorael]

Re: Multimedia support

The normal gotcha is having your PCM slider in KMix muted (on Intel HDA cards). KDE apps don't factor it into volume calculations at all, while Flash does. So if other channels (Master, Front/Speakers, et al) are at 100% and PCM is muted or at 0%, Flash volume will be 0% while other apps will enjoy 100%.

[martosurf]

Re: Multimedia support

Hi there,

first of all let me say I'm running Kubuntu Karmic, I wrongly assumed everybody will understand I'm comparing actual Kubuntu Karmic performance with next-gen Lucid Lynx.

So, all the gotcha I suffer happens on my fresh Kubuntu Karmic with Medibuntu installed and PCM set to top, system up to date with traditional conservative repos, none beta nor backports are enable.

I wanted to know if you people have tried yet the Lucid and what where your impressions regarding to multimedia support since I'm having a bad time here fighting with Kubuntu to do simple things Ubuntu Karmic do without effort. I love KDE 4 but it's not ready for "serious" computing, that is a stable system. Hey, I'm not talking about using Kubuntu in NASA's spaceships, but at least perform with a minimun of usability in a home environment.

I love Kubuntu being a Ubuntu (Debian) distro plus KDE 4, which itself is awesome, but both are pretty unusable at this time.

Finally I get DVD playing in Dragon Plater and movies loading subtitles in KMPlayer and SMPlayer/MPlayer when they're not crashing, but still YouTube's muted.
And another detail that creep me out: why in the world, Dolphin, being soooo advanced as it is based on the soooo powerful KDE 4 infrastructure don't show thumbnails natively? Nautilus/GNOME may be the poor man election when compared with KDE4's Dolphin, but at least it performs like a rich man and viceversa :S

Thanks for your time guys, best!

[maestrobwh1]

Re: Multimedia support

I am running Lucid as of today on a fairly low end (MLC type) SSD that I stuck in my IBM t43 Thinkpad. It is an older notebook, although I do have 2 GB RAM. Aside from BIOS taking a full minute to hang just to tell me my SSD might not work (and it does) on every reboot:

Once I get past that; Lucid is up and running in under a minute. It is much faster than Karmic. MUCH.

I used the mediabuntu repos and followed the "Comprehensive Multimedia..." thread under Ubuntu forums. So far, everything works flawlessly. I would trust it over WinXP to run a NASA spaceship. Those probably still use Win 3.1 though.

I am also running XP in Virtualbox and it also flies.

This SSD under Intrepid was unusable. It might either have to do with kernel features in later ubuntu kernels, or it might have to do with EXT4. Not sure, but it is not "sticky" like it was in the past.