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viewable Media file on USB media running on any OS: Linux, OSX, and Windows no installation and no reboot

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media on USB
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viewable Media file on USB media running on any OS: Linux, OSX, and Windows no installation and no reboot

would like to view media files on USB media. Media files should be viewable without installation and without reboot.
USB media may contain binaries for the required OSs

Any ideas, how to handle this?
comments?

Simeon
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Cant you

Just put the file on the drive and youre good?

I think every OS has a built in picture viewer for example. Or do you mean videos?

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

media on USB
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it's mostly video and also sound

in this project, we might have any type of media, including video, on the usb-stick
regards
Andreas

NathanJ79
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VLC

VLC plays audio and video, but there are a couple formats it will not play. RealMedia is one. Not sure if it will render still images. Mine didn't like a JPEG I threw at it, so I guess not, however I suppose a plugin could be developed for it to do so?

Anyway, VLC is natively available on all three platforms you named. I know the PortableApps.com menu is said to work well under WINE, the Windows emulator for Linux. (Yes I know WINE means WINE Is Not [an] Emulator.) Since OS X is a kind of Unix, can it run WINE? If there is a portable build for OS X this should not be an issue, but WINE should be able to open the Windows version under Linux.

media on USB
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codecs, WINE, and performance

but then, all the codecs have to be installed on the system or inside of WINE. Emulations might also have performance impacts which might lead to a non optimal video presentation.

NathanJ79
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No codecs

VLC does not use codecs; rather, it has its own native plugins which do the same thing. The advantage to this is that VLC will render videos the same on any OS regardless of what codecs get added or removed by other applications because they're all contained in the VLC folder.

You're right about emulation potentially hindering the video, however, so in that case you would want a copy of VLC for each OS on the flash drive. Windows and Linux can both read and write to a FAT32 drive, and I'm sure Mac OS X can as well, so don't use Microsoft's NTFS or any funny Linux format. Then you'll just want to keep the folders separate.

Also, and you may want to research this first, but I think all three operating systems can render MPEG-1 (.mpg) video without codecs. Mac OS X will be friendly to .MOV, Linux might like a couple open source formats, and Windows will be cool with .WMV (Windows Media) but they should all be able to run .MPEG or .MPG videos using applications that come with the OS (Windows Media Player on Windows, MPlayer or Totem (I think it's called) on Linux, and QuickTime in OS X. They all should have no problems rendering JPEG either.

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