People keep going on about lack of progress on OpenBeOS. Well thats because they look for news updates. The real progress is on the important stuff, the actual source, and while theres not been a beta in a while, the media kit is now very usable, if you can sacrifice some functionality.
To install the media kit, download and compile the source. This is explained in a number of places and I'm not going to explain it again. Or you can get a built tree from the build factory.
To install it, kill the media_ and media_addon_ servers. Zip up those servers in /boot/beos/system/servers and replace them with the ones from OpenBeOS. Also zip up libmedia.so in /boot/beos/system/lib and replace it too.
Again, zip up the mixer and other addons in /boot/beos/system/add-ons/media, and replace the mixer with the OpenBeOS one. You can chuck in the multi audio media addon if you don't use Marcus's ICH driver. Unless that bugs been fixed that is.
Place the plugins directory in /boot/beos/system/add-ons/media.
Now start the media server. The media addon server will start itself then.
What you've lost functionality wise - RealPlayer no longer works for audio, however video plays. Corum III and Civ:CTP won't work unless each binary if provided with a local copy of R5's libmedia.so.
You also (currently) have no encoders at all. So doing media editing or conversion without ffmpeg is out of the question. However, PersonalStudio (ironically) opens.
On the system side you have a far more capable, multitrack capable mixer and multi audio system.
On the decoders side you have Speex, MP3, RAW and Vorbis audio playback, Theora and MPEG-family video as well as others, in AU, AIFF, Ogg, MP3, Musepack and AVI containers. Not all extractors are up to the same level, so seeking may not work in some side. If the tree is built with --enable-gpl-addons, you also get AC3 audio
Try it! Report any bugs!
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