Playing The Sunday Times "The Month" CD on GNU/Linux

By Phil Jones, March 2004.

About this page

This article describes how to play The Sunday Times "The Month" CD on the GNU/Linux operating system. The Sunday Times is a newspaper in the UK. This article is unofficial; it is not endorsed or approved by The Sunday Times in any way.

Does "The Month" work in Linux?

All the video and music content is in playable (proprietary) format. This means that all the stuff to watch and listen is available in Linux. I am using Red Hat Linux 7.2, which is a couple of years old now (released 2001). If you're new to Linux, try a modern release of Mandrake, SuSE Personal or Red Hat Workstation.

One of the nice things about using Linux is the memory (RAM) requirements are lower than in certain alternative operating systems. I found 128 Mb was comfortably enough RAM. Processor wise, I found my Via C3 700 Mhz processor chugged a bit on some of the video files, but that could be overcome by setting the playback quality to "Low".

Advantages of playing "The Month" in Linux

No ads

With this method you get straight to the stuff. You happily miss out on all the adverts. Playing with the Sunday Times' CD is a quirky way to spend a Sunday afternoon, certainly.

No spyware

The "conditions" state the CD is designed to send information to the Internet about "usage patterns". Running the CD in Linux switches that off, guaranteed.

What you need, and how it works

Video

All the video files on the CD are in Shockwave Flash (swf) format. Use the Macromedia Flash standalone player (gflashplayer). If your Linux distribution doesn't already have the standalone player, go to http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/macromedia/site_ucsc.html. This is a Macromedia approved distribution point. Once Macromedia Flash standalone player is installed and set up, just click on the "swf" files to watch them (the locations are explained below).

Ricky Gervais

Audio

The audio files are all in MP3 format so they play in any MP3 player. X Multimedia System (xmms) and KDE Media Player (noatun) both work, as long as they have MP3 support. The MP3s are 30 second clips. To play them all, drop the directory (detailed below) containing the MP3 files onto the media player. The player will start automatically.

Loading MP3s

The MP3 ID3 Tags are often missing. If you're used to MP3s with full artist and title fields, this will be a bit disconcerting. To work around that, in XMMS go into the Preferences (Ctrl + P). Set the Title format to %F (File path) and then you'll be able to see what you're listening to.

Title format preference in XMMS

So where's the stuff?

The main attractions on The Month CD are laid out as follows:

Content	Location
Cover features	assets/bespoke/feature/movies assets/bespoke/feature/spokes
Pop, speech and opera	assets/audio
Ballet, books, visual arts	assets/video/arts
DVD trailers	assets/video/dvd
Movie trailers	assets/video/films
Children's	assets/video/kids
Pop videos	assets/video/music

Playing all the video files in a directory

This command plays all "swf" files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

$ find . -name *.swf | while read a; do gflashplayer $a; done

What doesn't work

The enter-code-to-see-if-you've-won competition doesn't work. Suck. Maybe it would work under WINE, I don't know, I haven't tried.

By Phil Jones, March 2004. If you liked this page, send me the URL to your home page. I'd like to have a look at it! Email: philjones1 {at} blueyonder.co.uk. Replace {at} with @ to email. To the BBC News Online readers Hugh Neal and Murray Wicklow, this is for you!!! :-)