This morning I had to perform one of those tasks that I've hated for quite long time. Before you guess, no it didn't go to the dentist, and I didn't have to pay my taxes either.

Actually, what I had to do was to reinstall a Windows machine. Don't ask me why. I just had to.

The thing is that right after installing the operating system I started installing a bunch of additional software. You know, it isn't like when you are using Free Software, in this case you have to install all sort of basic applications in order to get some basic functionality in the system: burn ISO images, watch films, read ODF files, IRC support and so on.

So, while I was installing what people usually call a "codec pack", I though.. "Umm! It could be really handy to have something like this for my real computer". It could be kind of useful for me if each time I reinstall any of the OpenSolaris boxes I could get the multimedia applications installed in a painless way. I bet you know about all that legal stuff around the video codecs, so I won't get into that subject.

I have built a OpenSolaris codec pack to try to solve the issue. It includes most of the software you would need to play (and eventually RIP or re-encode) the most spread media content formats on a OpenSolaris machine:

The only thing you have to do to install it is to execute the following command from a terminal (as root). I've uploaded binaries for both i386 and Sparc. The script will detect the platform and install the proper package set:

/usr/sfw/bin/wget -O - http://opensolaris.es/codec-pack.sh | bash

It took me a few hours to get this done (had to write a few patches in order to get some packages to compile) but I think it's worth the effort.

Actually, it's heavily based on the amazing job that the pkgbuild project contributors have done so far, so.. thank you guys for all the great job!!

I hope you will enjoy it. :-)