I've tried a dozen or so distros, settled on Mepis, does more out of the box for me, but it's light on video capability, ie: conversion avi,kp4,mpg, to dvd,or whatever, burning, creating,shrinking, quickpar, unrar, etc. so: is there one that will do all the things for me that I have been having to jump to xp to do? I know the answer is out there, 'cause some of you have used em all.
Thanks.

Never used Mepis but Ubuntu will do all of that stuff for you with minimal tweaking.
Slackware also does all of that with no problems for me either, but it takes a while to resolve the dependencies. I use k9copy and DeVeDe for video conversion needs and k3b to burn whatever I create. I always run wine so i just use winrar.

The truth is ANY distro can do all of that, you just have to be willing enough to resolve any dependencies and build the packages from source.

Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast. Nice to have everything on there by default.

Regards,
JKZfixme

Most distributions are limited in what they can include by default due to patent and other "IP" issues. Many multimedia codecs, for example, are legal for individual use by end-users, but cannot be bundled into the distribution itself without paying distribution licenses (something almost impossible to do in open source). The most well-known of these being mp3 support, of course.

(A few distributions have managed to arrange agreements to distribute some of the more popular non-free codecs, but they're often considered to have "sold their souls" for having done so.)

In Debian the officially-provided versions of mplayer, ffmpeg and such have several codecs disabled, due to their guidelines on what constitutes Free Software. But for most people it's easy to use the third-party debian-multimedia.org repository to install un-crippled versions of the same tools.

I think most of the major distributions have one or more third-party sources available in this way. You just have to locate them.

Thanks, but ubu is a no-go. instaled it 3 times, wormy every time. lasts about 5 minutes or less before freezing. very unfriendly. lacks a number of apps. apparently not compat w/ my hdwre. Pent D 3 gig, on Azrock Quad board, (home brew)