14 DAY TRIAL // Fluendo has announced the launch of the Fluendo Media Center for Linux, a multi-purpose media player. It bundles the company's DVD player with all of the other codecs it has acquired licenses for in a single package, which should allow Linux users to legally enjoy all the media files they own. Fluendo Media Center is based on the GStreamer open-source multimedia framework for which it actively develops.
“The market was missing this legal solution based upon the GStreamer framework. Fluendo Media Center provides end users with a smooth playback and all correspondent licenses from patent holders. We have worked hard to build a global solution that encompasses all of our products as whole, and we have succeeded,” Pascal Pegaz Paquet, Fluendo’s co-founder, said in the press release.
The Fluendo Media Center supports the DVD, WMV, MPEG2, H.264 and MPEG4 formats and codecs for video, which cover the majority of video files out there, and the WMA, MP3 and AAC audio codecs. It also supports full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound and has a Dolby certification. The playback is based on the GStreamer framework and Fluendo has several developers working full time on the open-source project. Fluendo Media Center retails for €40 and comes in RPM, DEB, as well as generic packages for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. There aren't any trial versions, but Fluendo Media Center is available in the company's online store.
One area where Linux has always been disadvantaged is multimedia support. People have always had trouble getting their movies or songs to play on Linux, however the problem hasn't been a technical one, but one having to do with patents and licenses. Most video and audio codecs come with license fees and makers of free operating systems, like most Linux distributions are, can't afford to pay for them. This meant that most 'respectable' distributions didn't come with proprietary codecs by default, forcing users to use various, sometimes complicated, methods that were often of dubious legality.