ShiNNinG.net

Okay, first some background. About a year ago I decided to rip my entire CD collection to mp3. I had over 400 CD’s to do and the process took a couple months. I chose mp3 because it tends to be the most portable player compatible format out there. Plus I would be able to use iTunes for organizing my collection and to make it easy for the wifey to update her iPod. So I went and built up a BSD based file server that had a 4-port 3ware SATA RAID card with 4 300GB SATA drives in a RIAD5 array. It worked flawlessly, I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the CD’s and then ran them through LAME with VBR enabled to create the mp3 files all on my XP machine.

Fast forward to today. I needed to move my XP machine to a different place in my house but I still wanted to be able to play my audio files from the same spot. I decided to dump BSD and install Fedora, since I mainly only work with Linux. Picked up an el-cheapo sound card, copied off the data to a portable drive, and reinstalled with Fedora Core 6. The install btw went flawless. I copied the data back, then setup Samba and NFS to share it on my network. Everything went so smoothly, I was pleasantly surprised, these new Linux releases have come along way. So I plugged in my speakers and launched the included player, browsed to my file store and nothing…… Apparently the player only supports Ogg format out of the box, FC does not support any proprietary filetypes. WTF.

So after calming down I started to search around. I came across a site rpm.livna.org that carried everything a Fedora user could ask for. From the site:

“rpm.livna.org is a community maintained add-on repository for Fedora Core that provides many useful packages that can not be distributed in Fedora Core or Fedora Extras for one reason or another, including multimedia applications such as xine and VideoLanClient, video drivers for ATI and Nvidia cards and firmware for common wireless cards.”

That basically says it all. So, first thing is first, let’s get yum configured to use them as an additional repository. For FC6 users:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

They also have releases for FC5 and FC4 users, for FC3, see their website for special instructions. So now you have a couple options as to what you want to run, whether it be MPlayer, GStreamer, Xine. Since i’m running KDE I chose to install Kplayer:

yum -y install kplayer

And off I went, playing my 33,000 songs. For those of you that are interested, rpm.livna.org also has the proprietary video drivers for both NVidia and ATI. You may also be interested in the products from Fluendo. They offer fully licensed (read legal) multimedia plug-ins for GStreamer. For a small fee you can be able to play and encode in Windows Media, MPEG2 and MPEG4. They will be adding support for even more codecs this year.