{"id":587,"date":"2008-08-19T22:58:45","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T05:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/introducing-moobex\/"},"modified":"2008-08-19T23:01:56","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T06:01:56","slug":"introducing-moobex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/introducing-moobex\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing MOOBEX"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was sitting at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit<\/a> last April in Austin, Texas, USA pondering the state of multimedia usability on Linux. I realized that I live a somewhat sheltered computing existence vis-\u00e0-vis consuming multimedia because I happen to know a little bit more about it than most users. Then I got to wondering what the typical uninitiated user experiences when trying to play multimedia in Linux these days.<\/p>\n

That’s the moment when I conceived MOOBEX: Multimedia Out-Of-Box EXperience<\/a><\/strong>. (Initially, I called it MOOB. But I wisely googled to see if that already had some meaning attached to it. I’m glad I did, and I’ll leave it to the reader to learn about the colloquial connotations of that word if they feel so inclined.)<\/em><\/p>\n

For MOOBEX, I raided my vast personal multimedia archive and assembled a small suite of what I consider to be representative multimedia types. Then I developed a strict process for testing the multimedia capabilities of various stock Linux distributions from the perspective of a new Linux user. I tested the latest versions of 5 Linux distributions for the first pass at this. These include (x86_32 in all cases):<\/p>\n