SuSE 9.1 Personal not good for multimedia?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 08:27:12PM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> I am a day away from installing SuSE Personal 9.1 (epressly for 
> multitrack sound recording) and then I came across this warning at 
> http://www.madpenguin.org/Article1226.html. This review advises that 
> SuSE 9.1 Personal is good for everyone but me:
> 
> I am a bit concerned with the multimedia capabilities of this distro 
> compared to other multimedia-rich distros like Mandrake Linux. Although 
> I admit I'm completely ignorant of the laws governing or prohibiting the 
> distribution of a working DVD player in Linux, I do think that there 
> /has/ to be a way to make this work. There /is/ software available that 
> can play DVD media on Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.. so why isn't there a 
> legal way to make this work? Is it regions? If so, isn't there a way to 
> make the end user select their region the first time the Xine engine is 
> called upon to play a DVD? I'm not a programmer, but it seems this would 
> be possible. If this distro was loaded with multimedia capabilities, I 
> think it would round it out very well, to the extent that it would be 
> worth more than the $29.95 price tag in my opinion.
> 
> The bottom line is this: If you are new to Linux and are interested in 
> learning just enough to get your feet wet, and don't plan on getting 
> under the hood for quite some time, this distribution might be for you. 
> The only concern you should have is multimedia support, which SUSE 
> <http://www.suse.com> will hopefully address as soon as possible. Other 
> than that, this is a very capable desktop that you should find worthy of 
> the price tag... and to be absolutely honest with you, a great 
> introduction to Linux. There aren't that many distributions I would 
> recommend to extremely green Linux users, but SUSE <http://www.suse.com> 
> is one of them.

Well the marillat packages for Debian (which are NOT official debian
packages of course) have full DVD playing support and such, along with
all the w32 codecs needed for different video formats.  Makes life easy
for Debian users.

I have no idea if there are people maintaining such a comprehensive
multimedia package collection for other distributions.  I would not
expect any distribution to actually include it since the copyrights and
such are somewhat grey area it seems.

Lennart Sorensen
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