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HOWTO: Multimedia

Puppy has an excellent range of multimedia editing, conversion and viewing tools. The links are to "online help" pages on each program.

Note that you can install your favourite package through Puppy Package Manager (or other package manager, like apt or slapt, if present in your Puppy).

Graphics

Puppy has a very useful collection of applications and utilities for manipulating graphic images, both bitmap and vector. Programs like GIMP also support GIF (see, if you are interested, tutorial on GIF with GIMP), though GIF is unusable unless animation is to be prepared.

The following table is a summary (Note that by clicking on a link in "Program" column, you can visit that program's help/documentation):

Program Notes Supported File Formats
GIMP GIMP is an open-source cross-platform image editing program supporting a large variety of features and file formats. Large varieties of plug-ins are available, which provide even more features and file-type support. Read this webpage to see more of its features. BMP, GIF, JPEG, MNG, PCX, PDF, PNG, PS, PSD, SVG, TIFF, TGA, XPM, SVG and so on!
Xpaint Xpaint is a bitmap (raster) picture editor and viewer. GIF, ICO, JPEG, PNG, PPM, PS, PDF, TIFF, XBM, XPM, XWD
mtPaint mtPaint is a bitmap image editor which specialises in pixel-level editing of images, and can be used as paint program as well. BMP, GIF, JPEG, LBM, LSS16, PAM, PBM, PCX, PGM, PMM, PNG, PPM, SVG, TGA, TIFF, WEBP, XBM, XPM
Inkscape Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format. It also has got a variety of extensions to support more features and file formats. SVG, SVGZ, PDF, Postscript/EPS/EPSi, LaTeX (*.tex), POVRay (*.pov), HPGL, JPEG, PNG, GIF, FXG, SIF, HTML5 Canvas and so on!
GTKSee GTKSee is an image viewer, manager and slideshow. It displays thumbnails but has a lot more functionality optimised for managing images, such as showing the dimensions of images when there is mouse-over a thumbnail. The slideshow feature is very nice. BMP, GIF, EPS, PCX, PPM, PSD, SGI, SUN, TGA, XBM, XCF, XPM, XWD
Fotoxx Fotoxx is a free open source Linux program for photo/image editing and collection management. The goal is to meet the needs of serious photographers while remaining fast and easy to use. JPEG, PNG, TIFF, raw image formats
Gpicview Gpicview is an open-source simple and fast image viewer designed to be minimal on dependencies. TIFF, PNG, JPEG. and so on!
Viewnior Viewnior is created to be simple and elegant. It’s minimalistic interface provides more screen space for your images. PNG, JPEG, TIFF, TGA, GIF, SVG, and so on!
fig2dev fig2dev converts a FIG vector image to a variety of vector and bitmap formats. CGM, PIC, PS, EMF, EPS, PDF, SVG, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, PPM, SLD, TIFF, XBM, XPM and so on!
pstoedit pstoedit is used to export Postscript and PDF files to various vector formats. PS, AI, IDRAW, FIG, XFIG, TGIF, TK, HPGL, PIC, MMA, MPOST, SK (Sketch), KIL (Kontour), PDF, JAVA1, JAVA2, DXF, RPL, RIB, LWO, DXF
gifsicle gifsicle is a console program for constructing animated gifs. It is also a gif viewer. Most importantly, it can analyse frames and create an animated gif in which subsequent frames only have the changes from the previous frame, greatly reducing size. GIF
scalerx scalerx is a superb console program. If you have a small bitmap image and you want to make it bigger, it will have jagged edges, however scalerx analyses the image and smooths the edges. PNG
qiv qiv is an image viewer developed with gdk/imlib. As a result, qiv is faster than traditional image viewers such as xv or xli. GIF, TIFF, XPM, PNG, PPM, PNM, PGM, BMP, JPEG, SVG, ICO, TGA, ICNS, WMF
grabc grabc is a simple application that displays a crosshair that is placed as desired then a left-click samples the underlying color and displays its red-green-blue components. -

Video

Program Notes Supported Video Codecs
VLC VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. See more of its features! MPEG, DivX, XviD, 3ivX D4, H.261, H.263, H.264, Cinepak, Theora, Dirac, WMV, VC, Sorenson, DV, On2 VP3/VP5/VP6, Indeo Video v3 (IV32), Real Video
MPV mpv is a free media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. See ffmpeg's supported video codecs.
Mplayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. See more of its features! MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA
gxine gxine is a media player that will handle a wide range of video file formats and uses the back-end engine - xine-lib. mpeg 1/2/4, ms mpeg, divx, motion jpeg, Cinepak, DV, msvc, ms rle, Sorenson SVQ1/SVQ3, cyuv, roq video, QT RLE, SMC, RPZA, Theora, Indeo 3.1-5.0, Window Media Video, On2 VP3.1, I263, Real Media

Audio

Program Notes Supported Audio Codecs
Audacity

Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder. Audacity is free, open source software.

Note that you can install optional ffmpeg dependency to get support of more audio formats.

MP3, Ogg, Vorbis, FLAC and MP2
pMusic pMusic is a GUI media program developed specifically for PuppyLinux. You can play music from files, radio stations, podcasts and CDs. 3gp, aac, ac3, act, aif, aiff, amr, ape, asf, au, dss, flac, gsm, m4 (a/b), mmf, mp (1/2/3/4), mpc, oga, ogg, opus, ra, raw, rm, shn, sln, tta, voc, wav, webm, and so on!
wavplay wavplay is a console application that plays wav audio files. WAV
gxine

gxine is a media player that will handle a wide range of audio file formats.

gxine can also play audio streamed from the Internet. It will play audio CDs without requiring an internal cable connecting audio-out on CD-drive to sound card -- other CD players listed below require the cable.

mpeg, a/52 (ac3), aac, dts, vorbis, pcm, adpcm (MS/IMA/DVI/Dialogic), mu-law and A-law, roq dpcm, Real Media dnet, Real Media 28.8, DivX (WMA), GSM 6.10, FLAC, NSF, Speex, MS GSM, Intel Music Coder, Voxware Metasound, ACELP.net, dnet, QDM
ripperX

Rips songs off audio CDs and saves them as wav or mp3.

You could use ripperX as just a CD player. One great thing is the support for cddb -- if connected to the Internet, just click the cddb button and all the CD song titles will get downloaded.

Imports:- CD audio tracks

Exports:- Ogg, MP3, FLAC

Asunder Asunder is a free and open-source graphical audio CD ripper program.

Imports:- CD audio tracks

Exports:- WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, Wavpack, Musepack, AAC, and Monkey's audio files

cdplay Console application to play audio CDs. Imports:- CD audio tracks
graveman! graveman! can be used to burn audio CDs from audio files. See graveman's home page.

Imports:- WAV, Ogg, MP3, Flac

Exports:- CD audio tracks

Scanning

All modern Puppies are built with a shell command named xsaneshell. It is built as a wrapper around the command xsane, so as to allow xsane to work in Puppy. xsane itself is a GUI front-end to sane command.

To run the command, open up a terminal and enter this command there:- xsaneshell

Printing

Printing in Puppy is based around Ghostscript and CUPS, and the main applications such as Abiword, Amaya, Xpaint and Firefox, generate files in Postscript format for printing. The gs program is able to convert Postscript files to a format suited to a particular printer.

The Ghostscript package has its own set of printer drivers, however that is very limited. So, Puppy uses the Gutenprint drivers, that works with Ghostscript. This adds support for over 1300 printers.

To be able to print, you must first run the CUPS Printer Wizard. This enables you to choose the correct driver and configure it to work in Puppy. To run this application, open up a terminal and enter this command in it:- cups_shell

CUPS, Ghostscript, fonts, and the full set of Gutenprint drivers are usually built-in to Puppy. But, in case they are not present, you'll have to install them using the package manager your Puppy provides. Note that if you have a Hewlett Packard printer that is not in the Gutenprint driver-suite, there is an extra PET package available, named hpijs or hplip.