More thinking out loud PLUS my two cents....throw in the modulus operator
to get the remainder and the result is my opinion, worth about as much as
the Canadian dollar rose in value today :)
I'd love to see more Multimedia development for Linux. It has been pretty
bad up to this point, ie, a serious studio, radio station, musician
wouldn't look at it for anything other than a file/print/web/ftp server.
Although I should mention that I love doing bitmap manipulation with the
Gimp.
In the early 90's I remember waiting for SGI's (then) new machine to come
out and dazzle the mac. Sticker price was $10,000USD but looked well
worth it....although it was mostly aimed at video. Short of it was that I
never saw one. I remember the frustration of sitting in the studio in '93
trying to segue-way between two songs with the sound of footsteps panning
across the soundscape....it took 2 hours, primarily because at that time
the old mac (IIC I believe) couldn't overlap more than about 4 secs of
audio, even with pro-tools hardware.
I spent 1995-1997 in a radio station trying to run some early software on
DOS and the majority of the time was spent trying to free up memory below
640k that caused lockups. Nasty, and never again.
Right now I'm beginning to produce a radio program and selecting the
platform. Unfortunately it won't be Linux. I was looking at Be until it
went poof. It will likely settle on Win with some commercial software.
There are some good linux programs starting right now, but some are early
development, others are propietary to certain sound hardware. When in
radio we used a pair of Antex cards with Dolby AC-2 compression performed
right on the card freeing up the processor on the MB and that was a most
impressive feat. I'm wondering if manufacturers of said hardware would
ever write those drivers for linux.
X may be slow in areas for sure, but I can tell you that XMMS and
associated plugins run MUCH faster on my 100MHz Pentium machine than did
Winamp and associated visual plugins (or cthuga on dos) on my 266MHz
Pentium MMX machine. On Linux the visuals were seamless and the plugins
ran nicely. On windows I shut them off totally because they were so out
of synch.
Unfortunately I can't say the same for most wav editors for X windows.
This is likely the result of programs being written in Xforms, python,
perl, tcl that should be done in C. Although 100MHz may not be much of a
machine these days, it is my measure of performance. Coming from radio
using only a 75MHz and the old days of processing on 386s and old macs,
there is nonetheless noticeable differences that can easily be measured by
frustration factors.
While alsa was looking like a good project, the cheapo card that I run now
(because my roland card is unsupported) has just awful sound with alsa.
It is a crystal isa plug'n'play based card that sounds fine with OSS, but
OSS has no midi capabilities for it.
I'm truly looking forward to the advances being made right now in terms of
linux audio and GUIs. My machine encodes and decodes mp3s and realaudio
very nice using linux, especially command line. I would love to see
better, even commercial programs for editing and mastering digital audio.
Ports of some of the more famous stuff would be great....as well as
clones. Of course high-end CD duplication and label printing devices
would be welcome as well :)
Rob
On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, you wrote:
> WARNING: no actual information here, just thinking out loud.
>
> On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 04:45:20PM -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, cristian wrote:
> >
> > > Maybe some of you tried it. Would it be possible to
> > > achieve the same multimedia machine using RedHat ?
> >
> > I doubt it. Be's native API is really geared toward threaded
> > applications, and it has a very fast windowing system. X is probably
> > going to bottleneck a lot of the stuff that BeOS does just to show
> > off.
>
> I've wondered about this myself. SGI based a significant portion of
> their business on multimedia Unix boxes; granted the OS they used was
> IRIX and the platform was mostly MIPS, and SGI is now headed directly for
> the dustbin, so I wouldn't recommend that anybody actually buy an SGI
> machine for anything real these days. (On that note, Be ain't doing so
> hot either last I checked.)
>
> But SGI proved it could be done long before there was a BeOS. Linux seems
> to be going pretty strong these days, modern hardware is fast enough to get
> around some of X's bottlenecks (provided you're running X server and client
> on the same machine, at least), or there are some alternative windowing
> systems coming up (I've not tried any of them) which promise better
> performance than X can put out.
>
> A lot of the development in recent kernel versions has promoted multimedia.
> Video now has kernel-level support depending on the card you have. Sound
> has been getting better.
>
> As SGI spirals downward, they appear to be trying to get as much of their
> technology out in the open as they can, before the company goes away.
> Probably the best example of this is their release of IRIX's filesystem
> and volume management software into open source, but there has been other
> stuff as well IIRC.
>
> Game developers, most notably Loki, have gotten good results porting some
> fairly graphically-intensive games to Linux, and they make at least some of
> their in-house tools public. Other tools like Crystal Space seem to be
> making good headway as well.
>
> So my view as an interested spectator is that Linux _could_ be made into
> a dynamite multimedia platform. But don't expect to find "Multimedia
> Development Workstation" as one of the installation choices in the next
> release of Red Hat. It will take some work. At least some software hunting
> and system tweaking, possibly some of one's own coding, possibly some
> specialized hardware (with all the caveats about getting odd hardware to
> work under an open-source OS).
>
> So, that's "could". As one recent American president was quoted as
> saying, "The waste from one year's operation of a nuclear power plant
> could fit under this desk." Yeah, could. Doesn't, but with proper changes
> and planning and a little luck, it _could_.
>
> --
> Michael Jinks, IB
--
... bacteriological warfare ... hard to believe we were once foolish
enough to play around with that.
-- McCoy, "The Omega Glory", stardate unknown
--------------------------------------------------------
This mail proudly composed and transmitted without the
interference of any Micro$oft products or protocols.
--------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
