Multimedia (MP3, MPEG-4, AVI, DiVX, etc.) support in Fedora 15

Why doesn’t Fedora support MP3 ‘out of the box’?

Fedora cannot include support for MP3 or DVD video playback or recording. MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary licenses. Fedora also excludes other multimedia software due to patent, copyright, or license restrictions, such as Adobe Flash Player and RealNetworks RealPlayer.

That doesn’t mean you can’t play .mp3 files in Fedora, it just takes a bit of work (not much).

Follow these instructions to get mp3 and other multimedia support on your Fedora 15.
Open a terminal and run this command:

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Earth wallpapers for Ubuntu Linux - xplanetFX

xplanet (by Hari Nair) is a great piece of software capable of creating renderings inside our solar system. To raise the quality of it’s output adding some graphical effects, it was a great candidate to link with imagemagick.

The result is xplanetFX, a user-friendly piece of software to configure, run or daemonize xplanet with h/q capabilities to create wallpapers of mother earth on your desktop.

More realistic maps and backgrounds and a sophisticated graphics handling produce nearly photo realistic images of our mothership. It’s GTK GUI makes it really easy to use and provides a lot of settings and a user friendly access to xplanetFX. And even the templating capabilities give xplanetFX an individual and stylish touch.

The features of xplanetFX
 * Fluffy clouds with bumps and shadows floating above the earth
 * High quality earth map with bump, color corrections and subtle sea levels
 * Corona with realistic lighting
 * Atmospheric gleam towards the lit edge
 * Specular reflection of the sun on water, ice and clouds
 * Templates with online pool to download from
 * Post processing with contras and color correction and a subtle “washed out” effect
 * Seamless wallpaper change in GNOME, FLUXBOX, KDE < 4.3, XFCE and XFCE4, Fluxbox and feh wallpaper changer
 * Option to render to a specific file and invoke a command afterwards (change wallpaper of any other envrionment)
 * Startup delay to load desktop first
 * Creating single renderings for use in shell scripts
 * detailed logging
 * CLI Setup with customization depending on actual config (reconfigurable)
 * Small Toggle window for placing a starter in the panel
 * Daemon with nice value (less aggressive)
 * GTK user interface (english, russian, italian, french, spanish, japanese, dutch, czech, greek and german by now)
 * Different list views
 * Online theme pool
 * Extensive functionality in customization
 * Previews

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Suite of educational games for children - Childsplay

Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabets, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc.

Childsplay is part of the schoolsplay.org project

Childsplay includes the following games:
 * Numbers - Put the correct operator between two numbers.
 * SoundNpic - A toy for young children with pictures and sounds.
 * Packid - A pac-man game, try to catch the letters.
 * Soundmemory - The classic memory game, with sounds.
 * Fallingletter - Type them before the reach the ground.
 * Findsound - Listen to a sound and find the image to which it belongs
 * Findsound2 - The same as findsound, now with numbers and letters.
 * Pong - The classic game, play alone or against another child.
 * Billiards - Try to shoot the balls into the hole.

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Video Transcoder for Linux and Unix systems built using GStreamer - Transmageddon

Transmageddon supports almost any format as its input and can generate a very large host of output files. The goal of the application was to help people to create the files they need to be able to play on their mobile devices and for people not hugely experienced with multimedia to generate a multimedia file without having to resort to command line tools with ungainly syntaxes.

The currently supported codecs are:
 * Containers:
  - Ogg
  - Matroska
  - AVI
  - MPEG TS
  - flv
  - QuickTime
  - MPEG4
  - 3GPP
  - MXT
 * Audio encoders:
  - Vorbis
  - FLAC
  - MP3
  - AAC
  - AC3
  - Speex
  - Celt
 * Video encoders:
  - Theora
  - Dirac
  - H264
  - MPEG2
  - MPEG4/DivX5
  - xvid
  - DNxHD

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