FreeBSD's magical allure is coming to haunt me again. I really want to enjoy all the juicy goodness of ZFS, jails, and more UNIX-ness that I'm missing in Linux right now. The main things that are holding me back are hardware support and multimedia, and the former isn't too bad on my computer.
What I need to know is how far multimedia support is in FreeBSD. Are there ports for all the codecs and plugins I need to make my FreeBSD system as web- and media-ready as a Windows or Macintosh computer? I just need to be able to:
-Play DVDs (I'm pretty sure libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdplay, and libdvdread are in ports, so there should be no problem here)
-Play and rip audio CDs (I found ripping in the handbook; does playing work out of the box?)
-View flash content on the web (Flawlessly. That means no memory leaking, skipping, crashing, frequent process killing, and all that garbage)
This includes:
--YouTube
--Hulu
--Flash games
--Flash-heavy websites (a lot of company sites like to add glitter and gloss for marketing purposes, but sometimes one cannot even access the site if flash does not work)
-Use java content on the web (I've seen how the handbook explains downloading some files, dropping them in /usr/ports/distfiles and running some diablo ports, so I should be good to go here).
-Stream Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video (.wma and .wmv, respectively) from the internet either right in the browser or have a media player automatically open
-Watch the movie trailers on apple.com. Right now, this doesn't even work in Linux because the website is looking for a user agent of Quicktime/7.6.2, but there are scripts available to download these videos and play them. There is also an extension for firefox that allows changing of user agents on a per-domain basis (on that topic, can I install extensions from the add-on website normally in firefox?). All in all, this means I need to be able to play .mov files.
-Use all the patented code and codecs to play pretty much any media file format (with VLC or MPlayer or something)
Is it possible to accomplish all of this? I've seen a lot of problems around these forums with flash, even under Linux compatibility (hopefully they're fixed now!). I tried googling about codecs, and I found a port called win32-codecs, but a lot of it looks out of date or hampered by restrictions because of patent issues. Is this port any good?
I also googled for some guides about multimedia on FreeBSD, but they just say "Install VLC", "Install xine", etc. There is no talk about codecs or support for specific formats. This is odd, unless these codecs are included within these ports somehow.
The handbook covers some of this, which is great, but there are a few things I would like to know from the community here, like how well flash and java actually work at this point in time and if FreeBSD supports all the multimedia codecs Linux does. I've heard lots of FUD in the Linux community about FreeBSD's multimedia not being so up to par because of frequent crashes, old versions, and incompatibility, but I think (and hope) some or all of these assumptions might be obsolete or completely untrue.
Thanks in advance for any help.
What I need to know is how far multimedia support is in FreeBSD. Are there ports for all the codecs and plugins I need to make my FreeBSD system as web- and media-ready as a Windows or Macintosh computer? I just need to be able to:
-Play DVDs (I'm pretty sure libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdplay, and libdvdread are in ports, so there should be no problem here)
-Play and rip audio CDs (I found ripping in the handbook; does playing work out of the box?)
-View flash content on the web (Flawlessly. That means no memory leaking, skipping, crashing, frequent process killing, and all that garbage)
This includes:
--YouTube
--Hulu
--Flash games
--Flash-heavy websites (a lot of company sites like to add glitter and gloss for marketing purposes, but sometimes one cannot even access the site if flash does not work)
-Use java content on the web (I've seen how the handbook explains downloading some files, dropping them in /usr/ports/distfiles and running some diablo ports, so I should be good to go here).
-Stream Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video (.wma and .wmv, respectively) from the internet either right in the browser or have a media player automatically open
-Watch the movie trailers on apple.com. Right now, this doesn't even work in Linux because the website is looking for a user agent of Quicktime/7.6.2, but there are scripts available to download these videos and play them. There is also an extension for firefox that allows changing of user agents on a per-domain basis (on that topic, can I install extensions from the add-on website normally in firefox?). All in all, this means I need to be able to play .mov files.
-Use all the patented code and codecs to play pretty much any media file format (with VLC or MPlayer or something)
Is it possible to accomplish all of this? I've seen a lot of problems around these forums with flash, even under Linux compatibility (hopefully they're fixed now!). I tried googling about codecs, and I found a port called win32-codecs, but a lot of it looks out of date or hampered by restrictions because of patent issues. Is this port any good?
I also googled for some guides about multimedia on FreeBSD, but they just say "Install VLC", "Install xine", etc. There is no talk about codecs or support for specific formats. This is odd, unless these codecs are included within these ports somehow.
The handbook covers some of this, which is great, but there are a few things I would like to know from the community here, like how well flash and java actually work at this point in time and if FreeBSD supports all the multimedia codecs Linux does. I've heard lots of FUD in the Linux community about FreeBSD's multimedia not being so up to par because of frequent crashes, old versions, and incompatibility, but I think (and hope) some or all of these assumptions might be obsolete or completely untrue.
Thanks in advance for any help.
