LDP/LDP/howto/docbook/Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO.xml

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<article id="index">
<articleinfo>
<title>Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO</title>

<author>
  <firstname>Eric</firstname>
  <othername>Steven</othername>
  <surname>Raymond</surname>
  <affiliation>
    <orgname><ulink url="&home;">Thyrsus Enterprises</ulink></orgname> 
  </affiliation>
</author>

<revhistory>
   <revision>
      <revnumber>1.1</revnumber>
      <date>2004-01-31</date>
      <authorinitials>esr</authorinitials>
       <revremark>
	 Dag Wieers's repository is yum-enabled, so drop apt-get out
	 of the picture.  Add mozilla-acrobat installation.  Add some
	 attack-lawyer repellant.
       </revremark>
   </revision>
   <revision>
      <revnumber>1.0</revnumber>
      <date>2004-01-30</date>
      <authorinitials>esr</authorinitials>
       <revremark>
	 Initial release.
       </revremark>
   </revision>
</revhistory>

<abstract>

<para>How to get various proprietary and restricted multimedia Damned
Things (Flash, MP3, Java, MPEG, AVI, RealMedia, Windows Media, Adobe
Acrobat) working under Fedora Core using your normal package-management
tools. Includes Mozilla-plugin instructions.</para>

</abstract>
</articleinfo>

<sect1 id="introduction"><title>Introduction</title>

<para>There are some Damned Things like enabling Java and Flash in Mozilla,
playing MP3 files, playing Quicktime/AVI/RealMedia/Windows Media streams,
and playing encrypted DVDs that the Fedora distro folks won't tell you how
to do, either because they're afraid of being sued under the DMCA or for
various other esthetic and political reasons.</para>

<para>This HOWTO collects the relevant information in one place. It is not
a general multimedia-on-Linux HOWTO; if it were, there are hundreds of
nifty tools and packages it would list (starting with the GIMP and all its
kindred and forks and symbiotes).  The packages we'll cover here are just the
legal and political hot potatos, the stuff that threatens monopolies and
worries lawyers.</para>

<para>Good background information on souping up your Fedora system can also
be found at the <ulink url="http://fedoranews.org/">FedoraNEWS</ulink>
website.  Mauriat Miranda's <ulink
url='http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc1.html'>Personal Fedora
Core 1 Installation Guide</ulink> is also useful.  One assumption that
distinguishes this document from these other sources is that you are as
lazy as I am &mdash; you want to install your Damned Things (and, later,
update them) with your normal package-management tools rather than having
to go to special sites, download source tarballs, or execute unique build
procedures.</para>

<para>Legal note: No source code or locations of source code of any
software alleged to be covered by the DMCA is disclosed on this page, you
will have to look on my personal website for that. The DMCA is a bad law
rammed down our throats by fools and villains and the use of it to
suppress free speech about software is a disgrace, but in order to ensure that
this HOWTO gets maximum distribution I have remained in compliance with it
here.</para>

<para>One reason I am doing this is that I think I'm a harder target for
the attack lawyers than most hackers; public fame and a reputation for
truth-telling are helpful here.  If you are an attack lawyer, be warned
that I invariably respond to attempts at intimidation by fighting back,
that I am legally savvy and <emphasis>very</emphasis> good at working the
press, and that I <emphasis>will</emphasis> exert all my considerable
ability to make your and your client's name a public disgrace if you try to
suppress my speech.  You have been warned.</para>

<sect2 id="newversions"><title>New versions of this document</title>

<para>You can also view the latest version of this HOWTO on the World Wide
Web via the URL <ulink url="&howto;Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO.html">
&howto;Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO.html</ulink>.</para>

<para>Feel free to mail any comments about this HOWTO, or additions or bug
fixes, to Eric S. Raymond, <email>esr@snark.thyrsus.com</email>. But please
don't ask me to troubleshoot your multimedia or plugin configuration
problems; if you do, I'll just ignore you. Everything I know about this
subject is already here.</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>

<sect1><title>Tools and Repositories</title>

<para>Modern Linuxes are rapidly moving towards a world in which physical
media are used for OS installation only, with updates being fetched and
installed by tools querying Internet repositories.  You'll need to know
a bit about three of these tools:</para>

<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>apt-get</term>
<listitem><para>Grandaddy of the network package installers. Originally
from Debian, later ported to RPM-based distributions.  Not shipped with
Fedora Core, but sometimes useful to have around because some repositories
don't support the other tools.  The procedures in this HOWTO no longer
require you to use apt-get, but you should know it's there.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>yum</term>
<listitem><para>The Yellow Dog Update Manager, comes installed with Fedora
Core. It will help you download updates from the Fedora repository, and
from other repositories that carry Damned Things that Fedora won't.  I
like it a bit better than apt-get (a s), as it seems to grab package list
updates automatically that apt makes you do manually.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>up2date</term>
<listitem><para>This is a shell around yum/apt (it can also
query a local directory on your hard drive).  Most convenient of the
three; watching it is informative.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>

<para>You also need to know about some repositories:</para>

<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><ulink url="http://rpm.livna.org">rpm.livna.org</ulink></term>
<listitem><para>A site, located outside the U.S. and beyond the reach of
the DMCA, that is dedicated to providing Damned Things that Fedora Core
won't carry.  There is no official connection, and in fact the Fedora
people won't mention livna in their web pages or documentation for fear of
being slammed with a speech-suppressing lawsuit by the evil shitheads at
the DVDCCA, but the livna people track what Fedora does very
closely. Accessible via both yum and apt.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><ulink url="http://freshrpms.net/">FreshRPMs</ulink></term>
<listitem><para>Best known of the alternate-RPMs sites.  Carries a
lot of stuff that hasn't yet made it into Fedora Core, but also supports
older Red Hat distros as well. The main source for apt-get.  Accessible
via both yum and apt.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><ulink url="http://macromedia.mplug.org/">http://macromedia.mplug.org/</ulink></term>
<listitem><para>The main source for packaged versions of Macromedia
Flash. Accessible via both yum and apt.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><ulink
url="http://dag.wieers.com/apt/">http://dag.wieers.com/apt/</ulink></term>
<listitem><para>The only place I've found pre-cooked Java and Java plugin
RPMs.  Accessible via both yum and apt.</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>

<para>To set up your tools, you need to do the following steps:</para>

<procedure>
<step>
<para>To enable up2date, add the following to 
<filename>/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources</filename>:</para>

<programlisting>
yum fedora-us-stable-fc1 http://download.fedora.us/fedora/fedora/1/i386/yum/stable
yum fedora-us-testing-fc1 http://download.fedora.us/fedora/fedora/1/i386/yum/testing
yum livna-stable-fc1 http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/1/i386/yum/stable
yum flash-plugin http://macromedia.mplug.org/apt/fedora/1
yum dag http://apt.sw.be/redhat/fc1/en/i386/dag
yum freshrpms http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/1/i386/freshrpms
</programlisting>

<para>You might have to change <quote>1</quote> to the latest Fedora Core
version number, if that's 2 or more. After this, the command</para>
</step>

<step>
<para>To enable yum, add the following to 
<filename>/etc/yum.conf</filename>:</para>

<programlisting>
[livna-stable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl= http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/stable
gpgcheck=1

[livna-unstable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (unstable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/unstable
gpgcheck=1

[livna-testing]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (testing)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/testing
gpgcheck=1

[flash-plugin]
name=Macromedia flash-plugin site
baseurl=http://macromedia.mplug.org/apt/fedora/$releasever

[dag]
name=Fedora Core 1 Dag Wieers' repository
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/fc$releasever/en/i386/dag

[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/freshrpms
</programlisting>
</step>
</procedure>

</sect1>
<sect1><title>Security considerations and other risks</title>

<para>All the yum and up2date commands I give in this HOWTO have to be run
from the root prompt so the packages they fetch can be installed in your
system space.  This means there is a risk that your system could be
compromised by a Trojan Horse RPM, either one inserted in one of the
repositories you query or one slipped to you by a man-in-the-middle attack
getting between you and a repository.</para>

<para>To control the latter risk, many repositories cryptographically sign
their RPMs.  You need to have a local copy of each repository's public key
in order to integrity-check incoming packages.
Therefore, be sure to do this:</para>
 
<programlisting>
rpm &#45;&#45;import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
rpm &#45;&#45;import http://freshrpms.net/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.txt
rpm &#45;&#45;import http://dag.wieers.com/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
</programlisting>

<para>You already have the Fedora public key as part of your Fedora Core
installation.</para>

<para>A long-term risk that you accept by using any of the packages in this
HOWTO is that of becoming dependent on the whims of a proprietary software
vendor.  It isn't necessary to have that old-time Free Software religion to
see that this is a problem.  Some of the software we'll cover here (the
Adobe Acrobat plugin is a good example) is distributed as closed-source
freeware &mdash; which is all very well, but what happens if the vendor
changes its mind in the future?  You could be stranded.</para>

<para>It's unsafe to be dependent on proprietary software and proprietary
formats.  When you allow yourself to be dependent, you also harm others by
helping vendors maintain an unhealthy monopoly lock on their market
segment.  So, if you must buy into these tools, please find some way to
support open-source replacements &mdash; donate coding time or cash, or
spend effort pressuring vendors to open up.  Rip your CDs to Ogg Vorbis
rather than MP3.  Write a letter to your legislator urging repeal of the
DMCA.  The freedom you save <emphasis>will</emphasis> be your own.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1><title>The multiple-repository problem</title>

<para>You have just set up yum access to four different
repositories. Before you go further, you need to know that mixing RPMs from
multiple repositories can be a chancy business; sometimes they can conflict
with each other, or have different and incompatible dependencies.</para>

<para>The livna.org people take particular pains to track what Fedora is
doing, so you should be safe there.  The MPLUG site is also pretty safe;
they only supply one piece of software which depends mainly on the rather
stable Mozilla plugin interface, and downloading an out-of-sync version of
flash-plugin probably can't do anything worse than stop you being exposed
to Flash animations (many people would actually consider this a
feature).</para>

<para>The FreshRPMs repository, Dag Wieers's site, and any other
<quote>outside</quote> sites are potential trouble.  Their maintainers work
hard at providing a useful service, but for various technical and political
reasons they don't coordinate with Fedora as closely as one might wish.  To
avoid problems, I recommend the following precautions:</para>

<orderedlist>
<listitem><para>List the Fedora and livna.org sites before other
outside sites, so they'll get checked first.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Installing or updating particular named packages with
apt-get is OK, but don't do a general upgrade using it. Use yum or up2date
instead.  (None of the procedures in this HOWTO use apt-get.)</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Disable apt-get access to any site that you have yum or
up2date access to. This may help avoid database inconsistencies. (None of
the procedures in this HOWTO use apt-get.)</para></listitem>
</orderedlist>

</sect1>
<sect1><title>Software Installation</title>

<para>For a fast start after you have gone through the configuration
procedure described above, do this:</para>

<programlisting>
up2date flash-plugin xmms-mp3 xine totem mozilla-jre mozilla-acroread
</programlisting>

<para>will install Flash, MP3, mpeg/AVI/DVD-reading capability (including
DeCSS for encrypted DVDs), and a better plugin for PDFs.  If up2date aborts
complaining that RPMs are missing GPG signatures, you can do the following,
assuming you trust your net connection is not being compromised by a
man-in-the-middle attack:</para>

<programlisting>
up2date &#45;&#45;nosig flash-plugin xmms-mp3 xine mozilla-jre mozilla-acroread
</programlisting>

<para>This won't give you RealMedia; for that, you need to do a little more
dancing.  What follows is information about how to install individual
multimedia packages, including Java.</para>

<sect2><title>Macromedia Flash</title>

<para>Fedora won't distribute from their site because Macromedia's license
doesn't permit it, but there are no other legal barriers to using the RPMs
at <ulink
url="http://macromedia.mplug.org/">http://macromedia.mplug.org/</ulink>.</para>

<para>With the up2date preparation described above, you can install
Flash by typing:</para>

<programlisting>
up2date flash-plugin
</programlisting> 

</sect2>
<sect2><title>MP3</title>

<para>Fedora won't ship MP3-capable software because the Fraunhofer
Institute's patent license terms are not compatible with the GPL.</para>

<para>Note: If your Fedora distribution is fresh out of the box, you will 
probably have to make <filename>/dev/dsp</filename> be owned by
yourself before you can play any sounds at all.</para>

<para>Assuming you've got your yum configuration pointed at livna.org and
FreshRPMs, the command</para>

<programlisting>
up2date xmms-mp3
</programlisting> 

<para>should make your XMMS program mp3-capable.</para>

<para>Installing xmms-mp3 will probably install an ALSA library, which you
can ignore if using a pre-2.6, non-ALSA configuration.  To actually enable
MP3 playing, you'll need to run xmms.  Select Options > Preferences > Audio
I/O Plugins from the menu; this will pop up a window listing plugins.
Select "MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Placeholder Plugin" and uncheck [ ] Enable Plugin.
With this placeholder gone, xmms will plug in xmms-mp3 automatically.</para>

<para>If you want simple MP3 sound editing, I'm a big fan of <ulink
url='http://audacity.sourceforge.net/'>Audacity</ulink>.  The command</para>

<programlisting>
up2date audacity
</programlisting> 

<para>will grab and install both Audacity (a very nifty
multi-format audio editor) and the <ulink
url='http://lame.sourceforge.net/'>lame</ulink> library that it needs as a
plugin to do MP3s.  Audacity has no IP-law problems in itself; lame is
affected by the Fraunhofer Institute patents.</para>

</sect2>
<sect2><title>Java</title>

<para>Java is downloadable and redistributable from Sun, but only for
personal and not-for-profit use.  Sun's Javs license is non-open-source,
so Fedora and most other Linux distributions won't carry it.</para>

<para>Assuming your yum configuration points at Dag Wieers's repository,
the following command will Java-enable your browser:</para>

<programlisting>
yum mozilla-jre
</programlisting>

<para>You can test your Java plugin at Sun's <ulink
url="http:://www.java.sun.com/applets/">Applets</ulink> page.  Note that
some of these applets (Escher and Starfield, when I checked) appear to be
broken.  BouncingHeads makes a good test.</para>

</sect2>
<sect2><title>Adobe Acrobat</title>

<para>You may have noticed that PDF pages downloaded off the Web often
display as blank pages in Mozilla, though they look fine when viewed 
locally with xpdf.  I don't know why this is, but in several cases I've
been told by the creator that they were made with Adobe Acrobat.  It is
therefore a good bet that Adobe's official Acrobat plugin will help.
Install it with</para>

<programlisting>
yum mozilla-acrobat
</programlisting>

<para>Adobe's Acrobat plugin is proprietary, so Fedora and other
distributions won't carry it.  But there is no known legal problem with
the RPM.</para>

</sect2>
<sect2><title>Local MPEG and AVI</title>

<para>MPEG (the format used on DVDs) represents itself as an open standard,
but most Linux distributions won't ship software that read it because of
blocking patents held by MPEGLA.  AVI and Apple QuickTime have proprietary
codecs covered by patents, so most Linux distributions won't ship software
that decodes them, either.  But with the setup we've described, this
command</para>

<programlisting>
up2date xine
</programlisting>

<para>will install or update the xine player that can handle these formats.
Doing this will also install a number of support libraries, including the
libdvdcss plugin that the xine people won't talk about on their site
because they are too frightened of the DVDCCA's attack lawyers.</para>

<para>Test this on any DVD.  Remember that you have to either link
<filename>/dev/dvd</filename> with your physical DVD device or go through
xine's impenetrable configuration dialogue. Also remember that the physical
device has to be readable by you.</para>

<para>xine has an elaborate GUI of its own, but most of the guts of the
program are in a callable library and there are several other front ends
for it floating around (none of them shipped with FC1).  One of these is
gzine, a Gnome front end which as of January 2004 doesn't have an active
maintainer.  Another (which I haven't seen but have been told good things
about) is the <ulink
url='http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/'>kaffeine</ulink> front end for
KDE. Both of these are carried at livna.org. But the best of the front ends
is probably <ulink url='http://www.hadess.net/totem.php3'>totem</ulink>,
available from livna.org. This is a nice clean interface that doesn't
confuse the eye by trying to look like expensive stereo equipment.</para>

</sect2>
<sect2><title>Streaming Web audio and video</title>

<para>Here are some test locations to try streaming audio and video clips
from: </para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>
<ulink url="http://www.digigami.com/cineweb/avi-test.html">AVI</ulink>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
<ulink url="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/troubleshooting/">QuickTime</ulink>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
<ulink url="http://www.vdat.com/techsupport/windowstest.asp">Windows Media</ulink>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
<ulink url="ftp://ftp.tek.com/tv/test/streams/Element/index.html">MPEG</ulink>
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
<ulink url="http://www-306.ibm.com/webcasts/playertest/test_real.shtml">RealPlayer</ulink>
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<para>The Netscape folks have a <ulink
url="http://wp.netscape.com/plugins/manager.html">Plug-in Manager web
page</ulink> that's handy for checking which plugins you have available
and which MIME types they interpret (the <quote>Show Details</quote> link
below each plugin takes you to the associated MIME type list).</para>

<para>The rest of this section describes several almost complete failures,
mainly so that you will know that they are not due to a misconfiguration on
your part.  Linux multimedia streaming is still very, very broken.</para>

<sect3><title>Web audio streams via RealPlayer</title>

<para>RealMedia uses a proprietary codec covered by patents, though
RealNetworks ships source code of a reference implementation under a
non-open-source license.  Because this license is proprietary, most
Linux distributions do not ship a RealPlayer client.</para>

<para>The <ulink url="http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/">Daily
xine builds</ulink> has potentially valuable bits on it. One of the good bits
is a RealPlayer 9 RPM, something I have been unable to find in any apt or
yum repository.</para>

<para>This works under Fedora, even though the Netscape plugin manager
page doesn't detect when it's installed.  You will have to fill out a
small pop-up form the first time it runs; beware that the
permission-to-spam-you button defaults to on and you must toggle it off.
Because RealNetworks does not have a clean record when it comes to spam, I
recommend giving them a bogus address just to be on the safe side.  Images
do not appear within the page, instead the plugin launches an external
program in a separate window.</para>

</sect3>
<sect3><title>Web video streams via mplayer-plugin</title>

<para>The command</para>

<programlisting>
up2date mplayerplug-in
</programlisting>

<para>should in theory give your Mozilla the ability to stream AVI,
QuickTime, Windows Media, and MPEG audio/video files.  As of January 2004
(mplayer-0.92, mplayerplug-in-1.0, mozilla-1.4.1), however, AVI and
QuickTime don't work at all.  Results vary from a hang through putting an
unkillable blank window on the screen to crashing Mozilla.  Windows Media
works sometimes (watch for the legend <quote>cache fill</quote> and an
increasing percentage in the display window before the video itself plays)
but occasionally it crashes Mozilla.  MPEG audio files load but don't play.
MPEG video tests without audio seem to work.</para>

<para>The failure pattern seems to finger mplayerplug-in, as mplayer 
appears to handle these file types OK when they're local.</para>

</sect3>
<sect3><title>Web video streams via gxine</title>

<para>The command</para>

<programlisting>
up2date gxine
</programlisting>

<para>should also in theory give your Mozilla the ability to stream AVI,
QuickTime, Windows Media, and MPEG audio/video files throgh gzine.  As of
January 2004 (xine-0.9.22, gxine-0.3.3, mozilla-1.4.1), this works about
as well as mplayerplug-in, which is to say not at all well.  I've seen 
some success with MPEG files, but often with audio dropouts.</para>

<para>The failure pattern seems to finger the gxine plugin, as xine 
handles its file types OK when they're local.</para>

</sect3>
<sect3><title>Web video streams via the experimental xine plugin</title>

<para>One potentially valuable bit on the <emphasis>Daily xine builds
site</emphasis> is the experimental xine plugin to display streamed video
through a xine window placed <emphasis>within</emphasis> the browser frame.
This is currently pre-release software, and I could not get it to load
because of a xine library problem.  Here's hoping it will work
someday.</para>

</sect3>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1><title>Other Approaches</title>

<para>To turn your Fedora Core 1 machine into a low-latency audio
workstation, see <ulink
url="http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/">Planet
CCRMA</ulink>. At present their repository is apt-get enabled but not
yum-enabled.  If you don't have apt-get,</para>

<programlisting>
up2date apt
</programlisting>

<para>will fix that.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="license"><title>License and Copyright</title>

<para>Copyright (c) 2004, Eric S. Raymond.</para>

<para>Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any
later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the
license is located at <ulink
url="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html</ulink>.</para>

</sect1>
<sect1 id="acknowledgements"><title>Acknowledgements</title>

<para>Miguel Freitas helped educate me about some of the techicalities of
video formats. Dag Wieers contributed the solution to the Acrobat
problem.</para>

</sect1>
</article>

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