21–27 of 27 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xine, mplayer, divx, xvid, etc these things were a lot more temporary than I anticipated, but it does make sense when you take into account the competitive advantage of newer codecs, hardware acceleration, etc. And of course the death of the CD-R and the DVD in the mainstream.
I still use MPlayer every day. I thought it had similar traction with Linux users as vlc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xine, mplayer, divx, xvid, etc these things were a lot more temporary than I anticipated, but it does make sense when you take into account the competitive advantage of newer codecs, hardware acceleration, etc. And of course the death of the CD-R and the DVD in the mainstream.
Did any of you guys use Totem, Kaffeine? Man I just looked this up, XINE was integrated into these media players. Man i used those two alot back in the day. I was in college, so that means must of been like in 2001 or something...
I don't miss the days of bouncing between media backends hoping one would play a media file better than another.
That brings back memories! I used to have commit privileges for xine and worked mainly on hardware acceleration for Solaris/SPARC. When I started university the internet access in the student accommodation was only via HTTP proxy, and I couldn't access Sourceforge or Blastwave properly any more. So, perversely, my Computer Science degree forced me out of open-source for a while :-P.
Genuine question: how do you regard getting a degree in CS at that time [given the unbelievable changes in tech since then]?
Because while people have access to what we have learnt and beyond for free, going through a proper academic curriculum with the interactions the environment brings makes you a different person, and allows you to tackle depths of any issue without fear and uncertainty.
Being self taught or having a greater breadth with less depth brings you flexibility, but being “T” or “I” shaped brings much more than that.
Lastly, having that power is fun to begin with. Makes life enjoyable.
That brings back memories! I used to have commit privileges for xine and worked mainly on hardware acceleration for Solaris/SPARC. When I started university the internet access in the student accommodation was only via HTTP proxy, and I couldn't access Sourceforge or Blastwave properly any more. So, perversely, my Computer Science degree forced me out of open-source for a while :-P.
Genuine question: how do you regard getting a degree in CS at that time [given the unbelievable changes in tech since then]?
I often hear the sentiment that technology moves so fast and everything you knew yesterday is obsolete, but it doesn't really resonate with me. Languages, libraries, protocols, and practices come and go, but they're all linked together in one long chain of incremental change. Maybe large-language models will sweep everything away one day, but we had to start somewhere.
That brings back memories! I used to have commit privileges for xine and worked mainly on hardware acceleration for Solaris/SPARC. When I started university the internet access in the student accommodation was only via HTTP proxy, and I couldn't access Sourceforge or Blastwave properly any more. So, perversely, my Computer Science degree forced me out of open-source for a while :-P.
Genuine question: how do you regard getting a degree in CS at that time [given the unbelievable changes in tech since then]?