Linux Multimedia Hacks: A Book Review
March 23rd, 2006 by Philippe Bardet in
Title: Linux Multimedia Hacks: Tips & Tools for Taming Images, Audio and Video
Author: Kyle Rankin
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates
ISBN: 0596100760
Price: $29.95 US; $41.95 CAN
Linux and multimedia once again is the target of a book, this one coming from the long series of Hacks books published by O'Reilly. Although the cover credits one author, Kyle Rankin, about a quarter of the hacks were contributed by various people. I therefore refer to "the author" in the rest of this review.
If you're interested in multimedia and the penguin, you certainly must be puzzled by the plethora of software available for Linux. Which one fits your needs?
Linux Multimedia Hacks (LMH) explores several software options, the ones the author feels are worth spending time with. In terms of the hacks I tested for the purpose of this review, as well as my personal tastes, I have to say that I'm pleased by the choices the author made. With the help of this book, I've been able to solve all of the issues I encountered while trying to edit video on my Linux box.
Software in the open-source world evolves at a quick pace. Even though LMH was published in November 2005, it still is up-to-date. For example, my distribution of choice, Gentoo, still lacks some of the software addressed in this book. But even if your specific distribution does not include such software, the author doesn't hesitate to explain how to download the software directly in order to install the latest version available. Some solutions, however, can be extreme and require another distribution to be installed, such as the MythTV hacks.
To be honest, you won't find anything in LMH that you can't find on the Internet. But if you choose that route, you'll likely spend hours hunting down the right software, plus all if the installs necessary to test each of them. Alternatively, you can check one of the 100 topics contained in LMH and find a fairly quick solution to your problem. And if you can't find a complete solution to your specific problem, you still can find a good starting point. For example, the Festival Hack for speech synthesis mentions multiple-language capability, without explaining how to use it.
If you have other books in the Hacks series, be prepared to find some repeats from one book to the other. I happen to own Linux Desktop Hacks, and I found at least two Hacks that appear in both books.
LMH is open to a wide range of readers. Some sections are reserved for power users, but most of it is suitable for "beginners". A knowledge of the Linux world is required, though. With the constant evolution of Linux distributions, I wouldn't be surprised if those power-user sections become trivial in a near future, especially if distribution maintainers read this book and include the software discussed.
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Linux Multimedia Hacks
On April 28th, 2006 anonymous (not verified) says:
I bought this book a couple of months ago. While it does contain a lot of useful tips and tricks, it suffers from one main defect: The author is heavily tilted towards OSS and arts and he does not say a word about how to set up ALSA on your system! Hello? Isn't OSS deprecated or about to become deprecated? And where is arts development? I am quite certain it has stopped! How can one talk about multimedia without first setting up the sound properly? OSS does not allow mixing, so the author's solution to mixing (enabling more than one sound application to share the sound card) is arts! The newer versions of MPlayer do not support arts output any more (and did not when this relatively new book went to print). KDE does not depend on arts any more, either. So, it is obvious that arts is on its way out, too (which was the case when the book went to print).
ALSA suffers from poor documentation, but it seems to be the way sound on Linux is headed.I worked very hard at getting my ALSA mixing to work, so that skype, MPlayer, Amarok, kopete/gaim, and other applications (some of them running 64-bits, some 32-bits) share the sound card. That was one reason I bought this book (getting my ALSA set up right), but I was disappointed.
Overall, because of the author's anachronistic philosophy about sound on Linux, I would give this book a three out of five (best being five). Not a bad book, but one cannot expect to get his sound problems on Linux resolved reading this book.