Fighting with computers

I've been using MPlayer quite extensively since I built my digital satellite receiver two years ago. I use MPlayer to play AVI/MPEG/MPEG2/OGM video files and I use MEncoder to actually create such files from MPEG2 broadcasted shows. These command-line tools that are both great and free software. Tools are based on standard video codecs and there is even support for commercial codecs (provided you get their dll files). I've used MPlayer on Windows, Linux and OSX without any problem. If you are a perfectionist a great deal of fine tuning of codecs parameters is possible. If you are "good enough" guy (as I am) you'll be pleased with default behavior most of the time (both in terms of computing speed and output quality). MPlayer is a program to play video/audio files that can also dump audio to a file. MEncoder allows you almost any transformation of your multimedia files (video+audio) plus different filtering options and limited stream cutting. My main use is to rec...

This distribution is available on ftp.suse.com for a month or so. You can dowload the installation DVD or you can do an FTP-based install by booting your computer with a small (60MB) ISO image. I've been using SuSE for three years now and I am, most of the time, quite pleased with it. It is my main distro and I like to have DVD full of software I can install without having an Internet connection. I do like the online update feature too. I have been upgrading my systems every now and then, mostly because newer KDE versions use to inlcude lots of fixes and new cool features. But when I tried 9.2 to install in my trusty but old Toshiba Satellite (128MB RAM only) it took around 6 hours. Afterwards the system took, everytime, a lot of time to boot because it froze for a long while on udev. And when it booted KDE was almost useless as it was slow to a crawl. The system was still acceptable, but slow, on SuSE 9.1. Because I had an Ubuntu install CD around I used this instead and now my ol...