that book is too old (at least in my opinion) and doesn't include the relevant changes which happened to slack in the past several years

I think you can update codecs seperately, updating ffmepg libs, which are /usr/local/libav*, like you can update proprietary codecs, but it doesn't necessarily mean that mplayer will work with new ones.

Reversing engineering, which you called piracy, is illegal only because there a lots of dumbass politicians around in several countries. And those are pushing same laws for the others. Without RE, you wouldn't have a practical linux box at all.

Do not use these distros. Spend a month with slackware, you'll see how functional it is.
These distros are national ones, adopted for our country, but by using Slackware you help with internationalisation.
Happy slacking. поверьте

Hi! There's 0.0001% probability that I ever prefer Russian whatever-based distribution to Slackware. My selection is fully conscious for I like to use genuine and untouched distro. But I came to it through the six-months-long glancing through the variety of Windows-like and newbie-friendly Linux systems which were very suitable to let me get my first steps and find out which apps and desktop environments I like the most. Slackware is the clean and minimalistic distro addressed to those who already knows what he wants and likes. And it is hardly possible to install the Slack for those who sees the Linux for the very first time.

I just tried to say that non-Russian distros are not free of charge because, according to their local laws, they may not include third-parties' or reverse-engineered free(!) software without paying fees to their authors or license owners.
As long as their renowned Russian competitors are totally free I just may assume that there's no local laws in Russia that may outlaw the inclusion of that software to the official distributions for I've never heard about court hearing like Russian Citizens vs. Russian Linux Distro Maintainer :-). It's just an empirical conclusion that may keep me safe from being prosecuted while I'm using that all-20071007.tar.bz2 codec pack.

Merry Christmas!!!