[Gslug-general] Linux on PPC

[Jarod Wilson]

On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 01:25 -0400, Paul DeShaw wrote:
> --- On Wed 05/07, Brian Hatch < bri at ifokr.org > wrote:
> 
>  - flash is the only thingthat we're missing from my daughter's EdubuntuiMac.
> 
> Brian, that's m *much* farther than I ever got. I finally got another computer 
> to run Linux on because I was unable to get most media to work, and was finally
> told on Ubuntu Forums that the codecs just weren't available for the PPC
> architecture.  I would like to hear what you have done to run different audio
> and video formats.  I just recently dusted the thing off, so I might as well
> try to upgrade it while it's out.  It's a rev b or c G3 iMac.

Flash and windows media formats are the only ones I know of that are
really at all problematic on PowerPC. Flash, because you need adobe's
i386 flash player for flash 9 support, and windows media codecs, because
you need the win32 (x86 and questionably legal) codec packs for mplayer
to get the latest (but not sure you get the very very latest) wmv and
wma support. Everything else that ffmpeg handles natively works just
fine -- I've used xine/mplayer/vlc on a PowerBook G4 to play back all
sorts of stuff.

The only real issue with my PowerBook was that it didn't have enough
juice to play back high definition stuff w/o looking like a slide show
(like 720p and 1080i mpeg2 and 720p and 1080p h264). But that's not a
codec issue.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com