Linux Not Supported For Democratic Convention Video 794
bucketoftruth writes "If you browse to the Democratic Convention website and attempt to check out any of their upcoming streams, you bump into the following limitation: 'We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.'"
NASA too (Score:2, Informative)
NASA's site is no better for NASA TV In fact, it streams just fine in Linux (assuming codecs, etc), _if_ you can get to the correct URL to stream.
Furthermore (Score:5, Informative)
Biden his VP choice is against net neutrality [gizmodo.com]
I think Obama has lost his mojo.
Re:User agent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
It says you have to install Silverlight to see it.
I hate to say it, but Flash has existed, and been a viable option, for long before Silverlight, and it's got a far greater install base. Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.
Does silverlight for linux exist?
Short answer: Yes [mono-project.com].
I'm watching it on xine right now (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the direct link to CSPAN's feed
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=cspan/cspan/wmlive/cspan1v.asf&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx [rbn.com]
use this with VLC (Score:5, Informative)
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_2_primary?MSWMExt=.asf [llnwd.net]
Re:User agent (Score:4, Informative)
Would it function well enough, or is their notice legitimate?
It wouldn't work: this is Silverlight rearing its ugly head again.
You might be able to get away with user-agent spoofing and Moonlight [mono-project.com], but I don't know how far along Moonlight actually is.
$ apt-cache search moonlight
mono-smcs - Mono C# 3.0 compiler for CLI 2.1 (Moonlight / Silverlight)
I'll take that to mean "not far enough." Although you can download builds directly from the Moonlight [mono-project.com] site itself.
These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code.
That would seem to settle it: not quite far enough, unless you're willing to build it from source. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere, will, and let us know how it goes.
Re:OS Related? (Score:2, Informative)
Email Time (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than everyone speculating WHY they chose to use such an annoying setup and complaining here, let's just all Email them and let them know we are not happy and why. I did (not that I even WANT to watch the video). Doesn't take long.
Here is the Email address: info@demconvention.com
Re:Silverlight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's a better option? (Score:5, Informative)
There's Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player to choose from.
I'd suggest h.264 in an mp4 container. Quicktime will play it, Media Player should play it, and Linux (totem/kaffeine/xine/etc) will play it.
Flash is the known quantity -- it works on Linux, just not very well.
But I think pretty much all of the ones you suggested are a better choice than Silverlight, in its current state.
What video codec has a W3C spec? (Score:3, Informative)
It costs less to just design a page for W3C spec.
There is no W3C spec for codecs to be used for live streaming video and audio. When W3C tried to specify that browsers SHOULD [ietf.org] decode Theora and Vorbis in an object element (HTML 4) or a video element (HTML 5), Nokia female-dogged [slashdot.org].
Re:Furthermore (Score:5, Informative)
File Complaints Here (Score:4, Informative)
Switching to higher or lower rate streams (Score:4, Informative)
Ugh. What could these possibly offer that couldn't be done with, say, Flash?
I just went to Move Networks' web site, and the FAQ mentioned one thing that FLV doesn't appear to offer: automatic switching to lower or higher rate streams depending on network conditions. (Remind you of RealPl[buffering...]ayer?) Now all we need to do is start politely female-dogging to Move Networks to port its player to Moonlight, the Free implementation of Silverlight.
theora (Score:2, Informative)
You should be able to do both with ogg theora. GNU/Linux has done streaming media well for ages. If you don't believe me contemplate the flexibility of MythTV front and back ends.
They are, at least bright enough to use Apache (Red Hat) [netcraft.com].
Flamebait? It's true! (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh, we even had a story about McCain's tech platform [slashdot.org] (once he finally formulated one).
It specifically says that he believes in protecting children from porn and the RIAA's War on Sharing, but NOT 'prescriptive' legislation like Net Neutrality.
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Informative)
Why was this called a troll?
Because if sakusha knows that Linux has approximately one percent desktop penetration, then he should also know that the cost of adopting and supporting Silverlight would be higher that other more open methods.
Re:Does flash do live streaming? (Score:4, Informative)
Flash certainly can do live streaming. In fact, the APIs for streaming vs. on-demand are very similar.
Re:Silverlight (Score:4, Informative)
There may be some Flash based solution similar to this, but Limelight seems like a viable option to stream live video to a LOT of people.
Limelight is a content provider so if the content were Flash they could provide that as well. The Silverlight packaging of the DNC video probably has nothing to do with Limelight
Re:use this with VLC (Score:5, Informative)
Except it's the no-sound version. With a little guesswork, I was able to figure out the right one:
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_1_primary?MSWMExt=.asf [llnwd.net]
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
For *live* streaming, I suspect that it's far cheaper to set up a bunch of Windows Media servers than it is to set up a bunch of Flash servers.
Flash Streaming Server licenses are *extremely* expensive. There are open-source alternatives, but so far as I know none of them are very good at handling thousands (or tens of thousands) of simultaneous connections.
Windows Media servers, however, are just regular ol' Windows servers -- couple hundred dollars per box with no user limits, and they do quite well with heavy loads.
Unless Adobe manages to compete better on pricing, or unless some of the open-source alternatives get better at scaling to thousands of users, then I bet we'll see more and more developers pushing Silverlight without Microsoft having to pay them to do anything.
And note that I'm talking about *live* streaming, not streaming prerecorded stuff like YouTube.
Ha ha. From Boycott Novell.... (Score:0, Informative)
Your employer seems to be running out of money, thanks to foolish spending [webpronews.com]. $6 Billion sounds like a lot for a company that's about to blow its last $20 billion on stock buy backs, but that's just part of the great ongoing collapse [boycottnovell.com]. Got your total fuckwad resume polished up? It will do better than one that puts emphasis on any other M$ skillz when they are gone.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:2, Informative)
Why write Nader in, he's on the ballot in most states (the good ones anyways).
But the server runs RedHat (Score:5, Informative)
Netcraft confirms it. [netcraft.com]
I can't believe you guys didn't notice this yet. You're slipping.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Priorities (Score:2, Informative)
You are right, this was about money. It costs less to use this solution. Adobe wants your arm and a leg and possible your left nut for licensing for streaming flash. Windows media is essentially free.
If someone has the wherewithal to actually get Moonlight working, I am sure they could figure out the user agent spoofing, its not that hard.
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Informative)
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.barackobama.com/ [barackobama.com]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:02 GMT
Server: PWS/1.3.22
X-Px: ht dal-btn-n15
ETag: "74ea62-af3-48b339d1"
Content-Length: 1220
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:01:37 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1446
Expires: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:08 GMT
Connection: close
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.johnmccain.com/ [johnmccain.com]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 106909
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.johnmccain.com/Home.htm [johnmccain.com]
Last-Modified: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:41 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"18c861ab137c91:280"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:59 GMT
Connection: close
You can also try: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php [barackobama.com]
Most signs point to the fact that McCain hates Linux, not Obama.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Ever try exporting messages from Thunderbird to anything else? I'm trying to do it right now, and oh yeah...
Tbird stores email as the text mbox format. Just copy/ftp the file. No problem!
Still, you've got to be a geek to know that. But as a /. reader, you are supposed to be a geek and therefore know how Tbird stores email.
At least in any MS product that I've ever seen, there's ALWAYS an option to export data out as a lowest common denominator
Outlook gives you the "opportunity" to export emails as tab- or comma-delimited files. What app, besides Outlook, knows how to import tab- or comma-delimited email files????
Same error on Mac? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm getting the same error on Mac OS X 10.4 in both Firefox and Safari, as well as Safari on Windows Vista. In Firefox on Windows, it asks me to install Silverlight and the Move Networks plugin.
Re:OS Related? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:User agent (Score:3, Informative)
You'd need both Moonlight and a version of the Move plugin that integrates with it. The actual video experience is mainly driven by Move, with Silverlight handling UX and overlays.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:3, Informative)
Actually it isn't silverlight that is the problem. If you forge a safari user agent* then you can see it's the "move player" plugin that isn't linux friendly.
* Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/YY
Don't forget the Move Networks aspect! (Score:4, Informative)
There's a huge TCO advantage in the Move Networks delivery technology, as it can take advantage of ISP web caches so that multiple viewers on the same network can watch the same file chunk, cutting ISP's in-stream bandwidth requirements hugely, as well as outgoing bandwidth needed. For content like this which has a huge simultanous audience, that means scaling up is much, much cheaper.
http://www.movenetworks.com/why-move/frequently-asked-questions [movenetworks.com]
Move Networks also offers pretty seamless rate adaption, so you don't get buffering messages as available bandwidth changes.
I'm not aware of anything else like this availble in FOSS or generic MPEG-4. Most MPEG-4 software players and live encoders don't even support RTSP stream switching.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Informative)
If I recall correctly, he was the head of the commerce committee that was in charge of the network neutrality bill being pushed through a couple years back.
The guy was in charge of regulating the internet. And called the internet a series of tubes.
I don't even know what analogy to come up with in comparison. Car analogies are welcome ;)
Re:Priorities (Score:1, Informative)
When did misinformation like this start to get modded up as insightful?
Firefox has always been available for Windows, don't know where the idea that it was "ported" to Windows came from.
Here, check out the Phoenix 0.1 release notes [mozilla.com].
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Informative)
I think considering his experience he has an idea of what Linux is.
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/cbcd3a48-4b0e-4864-8be1-d04561c132ea.htm [johnmccain.com]
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Tech Savvy Convention (Score:3, Informative)
Minor math quibble:
0.000(recurring)1 is equal to zero, if you define it as 1 - 0.999(recurring). (Technically the notation you used isn't actually valid, but we get the idea that you're trying to express.)
The formal proof has slipped my mind at the moment, so here's an informal demonstration instead: ...
1/9 = 0.111111(recurring)
2/9 = 0.222222(recurring)
8/9 = 0.888888(recurring)
9/9 = 0.999999(recurring) = 1
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I gathered at the Ubuntu Forums this is an issue with Flash 9 and PulseAudio, hopefuly it will be fixed with Ubuntu 8.10.
So, Flash works on Linux, but not very good, and especially not very good on one of the major Linux distributions.
Re:The party is screwed up (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Free (as in beer) web design and hosting was probably enough to buy them out.
Microsoft paid for the software, the programming, and even the hardware for the Library of Congress's network to convince them to use Silverlight. It worked.