@GatorsFan :-
Yup; I would tend to agree with you there.
Apple employ a whole bunch of proprietary stuff, mainly to "lock" their users into their hardware/software "walled garden". We ARE fortunate, however, in that many smaller projects DO exist in the Linux realm to help cater for this stubborn approach to multimedia support.......and of these, ffmpeg is certainly one of the most versatile AND easiest to obtain.
In Puppy, we've been using the statically-compiled builds by
John van Sickle for a long time. Yes, they are quite large, compared to the repository versions, but then absolutely everything else normally installed via the package management system in the way of dependencies is already "built-in".
All the user needs to do is to download the version they want, unzip the tarball, then move the resulting 'static' binary into /usr/bin. It's THAT simple, and.....hey presto! support for every proprietary codec you can imagine is then available.
It's a good solution, and these builds are auto-updated on a "nightly" basis.....so are always as "current" as possible.
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It fixed a lot of issues with my Puppies when we found these static builds, since OOTB, Puppy always used to employ a very basic, stripped-back, 'bare-bones' version of ffmpeg. I could never understand why it was that mainstream distros seemed to cope with varied multimedia absolutely fine, whereas Puppy always seemed to struggle with the same items.....and this was
on the exact same hardware. It wasn't the fault of the hardware; as it turned out, the expected - and necessary - software support simply wasn't there to begin with.
Puppy tended to use a build of ffmpeg that catered to the default, minimalist multimedia apps that came as part of the ISO, OOTB. This was fine if you never wanted anything beyond basic MP3/MP4 support.....but as you know yourself, things are never that clear-cut. Codecs evolve over time, and different types wax & wane in popularity. Years ago, Puppy was, to a large extent, a victim of its own design philosophy.....that of keeping everything as small and lightweight as it could, to ensure stuff worked on the elderly hardware it traditionally targeted.
A decade on, and many of us are now running far more capable & powerful hardware than we ever used to. It only makes sense that the available software evolves to match the better hardware abilities....
(
shrug...)
@phreddy53 :-
Much of this centres around individual distro design choices. A popular, mainstream distro like Ubuntu - which Mint is based on - will very often contain pretty much everything including the kitchen sink. Many other, more lightweight distros will come with very much reduced multimedia support, leaving to the individual to add necessary software if, as & when required/needed.
The fact that a lot of proprietary software, including codecs, often needs licensing agreement means that frequently, certain items aren't supplied as part of the respective ISO downloads. It's all part & parcel of the open-source nature of the Linux experience.
Mike.
