Multimedia FAQ

About

I see a lot of the same questions constantly come up on the Gentoo Forums and on #gentoo about how to do some stuff with multimedia, ranging from basic to advanced topics. Most of these are already answered and come up on a regular basis.

I'm not claiming to be a multimedia guru, but I have run into a lot of simliar situations and played with a lot of applications, and get tired of seeing the same unanswered questions over and over. :) I'm going to write up a FAQ that should hopefully field the more common questions.

Instead of rehasing HOWTOs and tutorials, I'll have a mix of quick answers, keywords to google for, and links to detailed tutorials. Also, I'll be trying to cover the concepts and principles instead of providing detailed explanations.

I've listed below a few of the ones that I already plan on answering. If there are more that you can think of (keep them simple and short, please) drop me an e-mail at beandog at gentoo dot org.

Questions

Answers coming soon -- submit your questions

DVDs

  1. How do I rip a DVD?
  2. How do I backup a DVD?
  3. How do I do a two-pass rip of a DVD?
  4. What is a two-pass rip, do I need one?
  5. What codecs should I rip DVDs to?
  6. How do I rip just the audio?
  7. Is there a GUI to rip DVDs?
  8. How do I turn my AVI/OGG/WMV/RM/MPG movies into a DVD?

Audio

  1. What's the best soundcard to use in Linux?
  2. What's the best MP3 player for Linux?
  3. How do I know what soundcard I have?
  4. How do I get my sound working?
  5. How do I play multiple audio streams?
  6. How do I rip a CD?
  7. How do I burn a CD?
  8. How do I play an audio CD?
  9. How do I adjust my speaker volume?

TV Tuner Hardware / Software

  1. What's the best TV tuner hardware for Linux?
  2. How do I record / watch TV in Linux?
  3. Are there any USB TV tuners?
  4. How do I watch TV?
  5. How do I record TV?

Media Players

  1. How do I watch DVDs / videos in Linux?
  2. How do I watch movies in my browser?
  3. Why can't I watch WMV movies?
  4. How do I use win32codecs with amd64?
  5. Are there any command-line audio / video players?
  6. How do I setup permissions so a non-root user can watch DVDs?
  7. How do I watch a DVD with menu support?

Other

  1. How do I edit audio / video files?
  2. How do I stream audio / video to another computer?
  3. How do I automatically mount USB disks, CDs, DVDs?
  4. How can I eject a cdrom/dvd with simply press the eject button?