For #DigitalIndependenceDay, here's a list of #FreeSoftware I use frequently:

✉️ Mailing: #ClawsMail
🖥️ Desktop: #XFCE
🎬 Media: #VLC, #mplayer
🖌️ 2D GFX: #GIMP, #Inkscape
🧊 3D GFX: #Blender, #Blockbench
🎙️ Audio: #Tenacity, #LMMS
⌨️ Coding: #Vim, #Git, #Forgejo
🗨️ Chatting: #HexChat (IRC), #Element (Matrix)
🌐 Browsing: #Firefox / #IceCat
🧩 Browsing add-ons: #NoScript, #Greasemonkey
🏢 Office: #LibreOffice, #Gnumeric

#DID

My motto is; be grateful for all OpenSource software you like to use, give credits to the programmers when you find more useful parameters in your beloved software.

When I play audio files my player of choice has always been MOC; music on console has been stable for decades, is the lightest player I could find and is reminiscent of Midnight Commander / Norton Commander interface.
MOC uses an ncurses interface, has all you need at the fingertips and can play many legacy formats like C64 VIC songs {Last Ninja!} Amiga modules {Das Boot!} with ease.

MOC was released before Video LAN IIRC {I checked}

At a certain point I wanted to play my DVDs in Linux. Logical since my Linux uptime was much, much higher cumulatively, than my win32 uptime, where I gamed. Wine either did not exist yet or could do very little for gaming in general.

Then I learned about libdvdcss thus also about Video LAN.
The fantastic thing about libdvdcss is that you don't have to mess with the region of your player. In that period you had to download libdvdcss yourself from the Video LAN site.
You could only change that region for four times before it becomes permanent at the 5th.

libdvdcss is mighty.

I glanced over VLC, yet didn't brother to download the source code, since I use MPlayer to play my videos in combination with the Mighty FFMPEG library suite. When I finally came around to play with VLC I immediately noticed, how smooth it was coded. I also glanced over the Lua interface, yet left it untouched since I played with MOC, MPlayer / FFMPEG.

VLC X11 UI is handy when you want to move faster than in MPlayer, which made me play more often with VLC when I was in X11.

It was only very recent, that I started to play with VLC in bash.
I was on a notebook which was air gapped so I could not download MOC.
I invoked

`vlc -I
`

What popped up was so beautiful that I was CLI heaven. Every parameter you could think of, where you would normally need to wander with your mouse, you can just type in and get prompted to your shell. You can also do that over the network LAN by the way (wow!)

TIL another powerful feature of VLC cli. If you take the time to add the lyrics of the songs in the album to the directory where the songs reside, VLC will happily show them to you.

I was floored.

This is so efficient.

VLC will not go messing on your internet connection which may be bandwidth metered like mine. VLC cli has so many features you just have to check them out on your own, to see which one you like and then play with them just like I do.

Another impressive feature
One problem we have when we have to downmix 5.1 or 7.1 audio to 2.0 is that the downmix becomes too soft, often 16 decibels too soft. Video LAN fixed that so simple & elegantly.
Video LAN Client is the only one which can push its volume up to 200%!

Thank you Video LAN programmers for this amazing work.

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

#VLC #libdvdcss #MOC #MPlayer #FFMPEG #command #line #VLC_i #Bash #sh #csh #ksh #zsh #fish #Linux #OpenSource #programming

[Перевод] Как в Quake.exe появился стек TCP/IP

Quake, выпущенный в июне 1996 года, за срок своей жизни был вынужден оседлать три технологические волны. Наряду с появлением карт аппаратного 3D-ускорения и развитием Интернета, сложности у разработчиков игры вызвала и смена поколений операционных систем. Стремясь к распространению Windows 95 и Windows NT, Microsoft начала процесс замены своей старой операционной системы MS-DOS. С 1996 по 1997 год доля DOS на рынке упала на 50%. Некоторые разработчики, например, Blizzard North, делали рискованный шаг и создавали игры наподобие Diablo только для Windows 95. Компания id Software же пошла на подвиг по созданию единого двоичного файла quake.exe , способного работать и в DOS, и в Windows. Ещё более впечатляет то, что разработчикам удалось реализовать стек TCP/IP Quake лучше, чем у Windows 95. Давайте разберёмся, как им это удалось.

https://habr.com/ru/articles/968396/

#id_software #ms_dos #quake #mplayer #deathmatch #сетевые_игры