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Showing posts from June, 2008

Stop the press: Watch the news with Linux!

For the past three versions of Ubuntu, I have tested seven news websites to find out if I could watch their video feeds using Ubuntu. You can read the results for 6.10 and 7.04 , and 7.10 . Each time, I was disappointed to learn that a majority of the video feeds did not play correctly on Ubuntu Linux. This time, however, something amazing has happened. I don't know which stars aligned to cause this, but every single news website that I tested with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS now has a correctly working video feed! I wasn't expecting this great of an improvement when I began this series of tests. I always knew that it would happen eventually, but never this quickly. So what is the reason for this change? The video news sites have obviously realized the value of having a cross-platform video player. Market share gains by Linux are still small, so it is more likely the growth of Mac OS that led to this change of thinking. Be sure to thank your local Mac OS user for their help in fo