The Multimedia Question

[Elliot Lee]

>From what I can gather, here's what's important:
1. Promoting software freedom.
2. Making life easier for the users who want to play media files.

It seems to me like goal #1 requires that the default install and
official Fedora links not point users at software that is not really
free. Simple as that.

Within the constraints of goal #1, it still may be possible to make
progress towards goal #2. In particular, I would guess that there are
a lot of obscure-but-free codecs out there that don't ship with Fedora
but could. FLC support, anyone? And the patents on even the non-free
formats are going to expire eventually. It may not be top priority,
but it's not at all a loss to solve the general codec problem now,
even though MP3 & DVD playback can't be addressed right now.

I'm also wondering whether a separate "codec buddy" is really needed,
or if a better alternative would be using rpm Provides: to indicate
the MIME types that a particular package can encode/decode. E.g.
'Provides: gstreamer-decoder(video/flc)'. Then just make it easy for
people to add repositories, and integrate totem with the the package
management GUI for satisfying codec requirements. That way the people
who want to use non-free stuff can just add a repository (like they
already do) and it's not necessary to write an entirely new tool to
solve the problem.

Hope this helps,
-- Elliot