Try www.rtlnieuws.nl for example. I can get videos to play, but not on the first click and it tends to pauze more often than in Windows MediaPlayer.

Then try www.cnn.com and try playing a video there, such as the live cnn democratic debate. It doesn't work for me.

Only if the manual is complete, and I find it lacking in documentation for specific hardware such as my Logitech MX500. As you said yourself: you need to search google. Well, I don't want to search google, I want the hardware I paid good money for to come with documentation and software for my operating system.
And why exactly wouldn't the configuration be done right with a GUI?

And I use Arch Linux, so I'm used to manually editing config files as well. That doesn't mean I like to: I just *need* to, as it is inherent to the way the Xorg server work, but I learn absolutely nothing interesting from knowing how to edit it. I'd rather have spent that time reading a good book.

To begin with Opera and Firefox cannot synchronize/manage music on my iPod, thus these are not the all-in-one solution that iTunes is. Furthermore, have you actually tried it? I get the following message: "We are unable to find iTunes on your computer."

I have been using it for years to watch my movies, and am aware of many of the features you mention. Nevertheless, it is no substitute for iTunes and unfortunately it also lacks a decent browser plugin. It does work, as I previously mentioned, with the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin in Firefox, but that is not embedded video anymore.

Okay, then I triple that. A lot of Adobe's software are the ones to beat.

BitComet woulb be for me the best soft ported to linux because i can't work without this, i often download files from torrent trackers

there are more torrent clients for linux than there are for windows I think

If you want a GUI, I recommend Kubuntu or Ubuntu. It auto-configures some of the most difficult hardware.
I use Gentoo, so configuration files are not at all alien to me either. If you don't like using them, don't use Arch.
Try using Amarok or some other all-in-one media player. They usually can use a music store without trouble.Try the Xine Mozilla plugin. It'll play just about anything. Amarok can use the same backend (Xine) and acts as a great substitute for iTunes.

I know what Ubuntu can do, because I already use Ubuntu (check out the "distribution" field under my username). It does not have the specific GUI I was talking about, and the Gnome mouse configuration tool is a complete joke IMHO. Besides, I do *not* want anything to be configured automatically, I want to do it myself with a GUI. And as I mentioned earlier, I want the hardware manufacturer to respect my choice of OS and support it just as much as Windows or OS X.

What does not liking to configure Arch have to do with anything? I use Arch because it is i686 optimized and runs extremely fast on my PII laptop, so I simply put up with the lack of user-friendliness.

Amarok is not a great substitute for iTunes since it sometimes fails to synchronize music on my iPod and causes my iPod to be ejected. It also does not look nice (the progress bar during transfer, for example, doesn't even work properly), and frankly features an unintuitive interface. Neither does it provide access to the iTunes music store and it cannot even rip CD's in Apple's aac.

So preferably, I'd appreciate it if Apple would be so kind to provide me with a port of the iTunes software, which is why I posted the request in this here LQ thread, which was started for exactly this purpose.

I've tried Xine, Totem, Mplayer and even the VLC plugin. Only Mplayer seems to play *almost* everything, but playback is not always smooth (in spite of tweaking options, such as cache size) and the interface looks terrible. For these reasons I request a port of Windows MediaPlayer. Just out of curiosity: have you tried playing the clips on the websites I mentioned in my previous post? Do they work for you?

There are tons of bittorrent clients for linux, eg. Ktorrent, Deluge, Azureus, Gnome Bittorrent just to name a few

Um, I did an altavista search on imo and didn't come up w/anything related to video/sound that I could recognize - what's imo? Tnx.

I want to jump in here, if I may: I like to stream internet radio to remote speakers using an Apple Airport Express ("base station", as they call it). iTunes and Airfoil (both on Windows and Mac OS X) are the only software I am aware of that will do this. Does anyone know of Linux software that will??

thanks,

john

kTorrent is a gem. It's a uTorrent clone and supports protocol encryption to get past any traffic shaping or filtering services. I can't recommend Azureus though, being written in Java it's hella slow and just a general pain.

For a solid, low-resource client I use Transmission. Simple and it performs well on slower systems.

I've mostly used Kubuntu, and actually the mouse configuration is quite nice under that...
Actually, I'll admit that wasn't my experience (the iPod-related stuff). What version of Amarok did you use?
I don't think that will happen.
Well,

• rtl.nl is in a language I don't speak.
• cnn.com uses Flash, not regular streaming media. It works for me.

I recently tried KDE4, and I do not recall being able to configure everything just as I could with the Logitech utility. Maybe I overlooked a different mouse menu?

The one currently being used in Ubuntu 7.10, I have no access to my desktop computer right now, so I can't verify the version. But it's quite up to date and I tested it recently. I got an error message, and then the ipod just unmounted itself. GtkPod just works much better, if you ask me.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Still, no harm in asking is there?

I'm afraid not all of CNN uses flash. If you try the cnn *live* stream, which doesn't use flash, you will find that it doesn't play. I get an "Unsupported Platform Error".

It's an abbreviation for In My Opinion. Sorry for the confusion.

I can't read dutch so I'll have to take your word on that I'm afraid

I think that's the website removing the content on unsupported platforms (eg Linux) rather than the platform being incompatible.
Try changing your browsers user agent to disguise itself as Windows (there's a firefox plugin which will do this).

But from what I can see from the live stream it looks more like lazy web development rather than Linux not being up to the job.

That's just plain lazy. Sorry mate but it is. The mouse clearly doesn't advertise itself as being Linux compatable so why should you expect it to work "out of the box"?

LOL didn't you just make a point that the GUI tools for configuring the mouse didn't work correctly? ;-)


Except how to get the device working in the first place. Why spite yourself with half configured software out of laziness?


Personally I'd rather have all the hardware I paid for working correctly - but each to their own.

That's Apples evil lock ins in action. There might be a Linux work around - but alas you fear google ;-)

I hate embedded video so I personally don't see that as a downer.

The previous poster didn't specify KDE 4 - chances are (and I am making an assumption here) he's still using KDE 3 (like most KDE users currently are)