Back in 2000, xmms was the hot MP3 player for Linux that everybody loved. Most likely due to it’s near perfect match in design and functionality to Winamp. Well time makes you bolder and MP3 players get older. And with no major updates (not even a port to GTK2), xmms just sits around. Recently some distributions have stopped including it in favor of more modern players. So I tried Rythmbox (the Music management and playback software for GNOME.

Well I normally don’t get too many gifts or exchange too many gifts during Christmas. But this year I got an MP3 player. I got the Zen Vision M from Creative. And I was very much impressed. Outside of MP3 playback. It has video playback for MPEG, Divx, Xvid and Windows Media. It also has a FM radio, which can be recorded as well as a voice recorder. Reviews on the internet rate it better than the video iPod.

While Adobe is hard at work at version 9 of the Flash plugin for Linux, there was a critical security update that affected version 7 for Linux. It is recommended everyone update their flash plugin. Users of the macromedia.repo who have configured yum, should run: # su -c 'yum update flash-plugin'

After almost 14 months, the MPlayer developers put out a new release: 1.0pre8 (I doubt 1.0 will ever happen). The official announcement was made on the mailing list on Monday. The mailing list had implied a release was pending. In the meantime, Fedora Core 4 came and went and Fedora fans are on FC5. The good news is that MPlayer properly supports GCC4.x (which FC4 and FC5 use). Anyone who has used a development build already knows these improvements.

I updated my guide to compiling MPlayer on Fedora. Of course, this guide is no longer necessary to most people, since RPM’s are available, however seeing as the software is a bit complex I compile it to suit my own needs. I’ve received many emails from NON Fedora users who have found the guide useful. So I will maintain it. Some things have changed in the past 7 months. LIVE.COM, which provided streaming library support for MPlayer, was renamed to LIVE555.