Thursday, September 23, 2004

Multimedia on GNU/Linux?

You probably know about Winamp, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Swish, Macromedia Flash, and other multimedia application for Windows. They are great products, but they weren't free. You have to buy a licence for each product (except for Winamp if you don't want to switch to professional edition) and it will cost you so much money. Each license only valid for 1 PC or 1 user, so if you're planning to install it on 5 different PCs, you should buy 5 license. That's the deal.

Suppose you want to install all of above products. It may cost you more than the cost you will spend for buying your computer. Is there another way to use multimedia application without having to pay for license? Yes... you can use Freeware application which can be found in the Download.com for Windows platform and Sourceforge if you're using GNU/Linux.

GNU/Linux was originally designed to be a server operating system, but in fact... they evolves so that it can be used as a desktop operating system, just like Windows. The consequencies that comes with this fenomena is it lacks of applications for desktop user, mostly multimedia. Luckily, right now, there are a lot of multimedia packages for GNU/Linux user which can be used to produce high quality project. If you have seen Shrek 2, than you have see GNU/Linux's power to make a great products.

You can use XMMS as replacement for Winamp, Audacity or Ardour for Audio section, Kino, MJPEG Tool, VirtualDub, and Cinelerra for Video section. And lot of multimedia is coming around the Internet from developers that can be found in the Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Just find it and install it. You may need some adjustment before you can use it smootly, but it's only a matter of time :)

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