On windows, it should be possible to make that work – via the quicktime addon. I don’t know if it works currently, but it shouldn’t be impossible.

On Linux, it’s not that we don’t know how to do it, it’s that it’s SPECIFICALLY designed to be impossible. The whole point of DRM is to prevent you (the consumer) from doing things with your files – that’s why I refuse to pay for it. Support companies that provide user-friendly (i.e. non-DRM) solutions, by buying from them instead of from apple!

– Mike

I agree with your priorities — take the time to get phase one done then move on to video.

I have two versions of Songbird running — one on XP another on Linux (Ubuntu). The XP version plays everything except the videos I’ve obtained from iTunes. If you are running those on your system, was there anything in particular you had to do to enable it? They were picked up and loaded into the library fine — they just won’t play. I downloaded a non-DRM .mov file of some concert footage and Songbird performed beautifully. Only the iTunes video content is not playing.

Now, on to Linux. You guys at POTI are a bunch of geniuses, surely this problem can be fixed. I suppose I can tranfer everything into mp3 and haul it over — but really, is that the answer? And what does one do with video?

I refuse to believe there are no options — something can be done, even if we don’t know what it is yet. Please don’t give up on this issue and just write it off. You guys are, truly, the vanguard for open source! Media is the last bastion of the old way of central corporate dominance and denial of consumer’s rights. Don’t give up on this issue — what you are doing is, literally, world changing.

Keep up the good work — you guys are awesome!

For the moment, our focus is on getting music playback to be 100% awesome. We certainly want to do video – there’s basic video support already there, but it’s not all that great – but getting really great video support into the app will take a while. I don’t know if we have a specific timeline for that.

I will note, though, that H.264 playback is working great for me in songbird (in the current development version, plus some patches I haven’t quite finished yet).

As for DRM: I think on linux, you’ll be out of luck. Sorry, that’s the nature of the beast – we just can’t do anything. I personally refuse to buy music/video online if it has DRM in it for this reason. DRM sucks

eternalsword: sorry, not right now. The GStreamer project will hopefully have webcvs up again (or something equivalent) soon!

The video feature of iTunes is incredibly important to me, and I am desperate to have that feature in Songbird. I am switching to Linux (really tired of Mac & Windows) and am very enthusiastic about Songbird and all that it can do. However, I can’t play any of my iTunes obtained videos on it and I’m having trouble playing anything on my Linux system due to DRM.

Is there any timeline when native H.264 video playback will be up? Are there any plans to work with sites like Hulu to obtain content? The ability to take a movie or TV show from Hulu and put it on my ipod would be incredible! And, while we’re at it, is there any chance of having the ability to rip DVD content into Songbird like you can a CD? I’d rather not use a third party app and the ability to do this would be one more improvement over iTunes.

Thanks for all you guys are doing!