Wine 7.2 Released - Starts Work On WMA Decoder

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 7.2 Released - Starts Work On WMA Decoder

Wine 7.2 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other operating systems...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-7.2-Released

[Quackdoc]

wma support sounds nice, how does it currently work if at all? I cannot remeber...

[Vorpal]

Can't they just use vlc or ffmpeg to decode? I'm pretty sure both of those are available in library form.

[smirky]

Can't they just use vlc or ffmpeg to decode? I'm pretty sure both of those are available in library form.

Was thinking the same. Also, if they are going to implement WMA decoding, shouldn't that be done as part of a library so everyone can use it? Or that only makes sense for Windows-related APIs in their dlls?

[partcyborg]

Fixes for half life? Really? You'd think like 20 years would be long enough to have a popular game like that working flawlessly

[leipero]

I just discovered recently the reason why some installers do not work, in fact, in their testing they probably work, because as soon as I pass "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" to WINE they work perfectly, so there's some locale issue in WINE builds after 6.0 (6.0 is the last known that does work properly on other locales).

I should probably report a bug on it, need to see what change have introduced it tho.

[Namelesswonder]

Fixes for half life? Really? You'd think like 20 years would be long enough to have a popular game like that working flawlessly

It's for the CD version, which is especially janky. It also wasn't even fixed in this release, it was fixed sometime between 2019 and now because the previous time someone was able to test was on 6.5.

About half of Wine's fixed bugs were actually fixed multiple releases ago, or years ago, it's just that there aren't enough testers to go through all open issues and test with each new release. If you check any of the open issues that are years old that have new comments it's usually the maintainers asking the reporter if it has been fixed in the new release.

In the case of the Half-Life CD issue it was actually the original reporter that first opened the issue in 2014 and was previously last seen in 2017 that came several days ago to verify that the issue was resolved.

[brad0]

Can't they just use vlc or ffmpeg to decode? I'm pretty sure both of those are available in library form.

The only open source decoder is in FFmpeg. Anything more is just more bloat on top.

[Vorpal]

The only open source decoder is in FFmpeg. Anything more is just more bloat on top.

So vlc just uses ffmpeg for this? Wasn't aware of that. But seems so, at least for some file formats:

$ pacman -Qi vlc | grep ffmpeg
Depends On : a52dec libdvbpsi libxpm libdca libproxy lua52 libidn libmatroska taglib libmpcdec ffmpeg faad2 libmad libmpeg2 xcb-util-keysyms libtar libxinerama libsecret libupnp libixml.so=11-64 libupnp.so=17-64 libarchive qt5-base qt5-x11extras qt5-svg freetype2 fribidi harfbuzz fontconfig libxml2 gnutls libplacebo wayland-protocols

Though for some other file formats it clearly relies directly on other libraries (plus there is a bunch of optional dependencies for even more file formats and features).

[brad0]

So vlc just uses ffmpeg for this? Wasn't aware of that. But seems so, at least for some file formats:

$ pacman -Qi vlc | grep ffmpeg
Depends On : a52dec libdvbpsi libxpm libdca libproxy lua52 libidn libmatroska taglib libmpcdec ffmpeg faad2 libmad libmpeg2 xcb-util-keysyms libtar libxinerama libsecret libupnp libixml.so=11-64 libupnp.so=17-64 libarchive qt5-base qt5-x11extras qt5-svg freetype2 fribidi harfbuzz fontconfig libxml2 gnutls libplacebo wayland-protocols

Though for some other file formats it clearly relies directly on other libraries (plus there is a bunch of optional dependencies for even more file formats and features).

Yes. Same with GStreamer as Wine is using. It's just another layer of bloat.

For a lot of formats it does. That package has more bloat than is necessary. 4-5 of those dependencies can be removed.