The desktop beyond F10

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rahul Sundaram escribió:
> Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
>  Or is Fedora enabling RPMFusion by default and
>> installing these encoders in an "as needed" basis when a user first 
>> tries to sync his/her iPod/Nomad/iriver/Sony/etc DAP?
>
> Fedora cannot do that.
>
> Rahul

Excaclty! And that is my whole point! Why lose time discussing this that 
simply cannot be done in Fedora due to the number of legal blackholes it 
would imply. There are a few DAP brands that do allow for free formats 
to be played back on them (iriver, Creative Nomad, Cowon iAuduio, etc), 
they can mostly play .ogg/.flac (beside the array of proprietary formats 
.mp3,.wma,.m4a,.aac, etc), but the main problem with these is the small 
storage capacity compared to the traditional iPod, and while pretty much 
all of these do support video, the video format they mostly support is 
also encumbered (h264 simple profile and MPEG-4 simple profile) I wish 
Theora will mature to the point that it would be a viable alternative 
for these formats and most likely would be picked up by some companies 
as well (just like .ogg Vorbis & FLAC).


I, however, wonder what will the status on this be when in 2010 the 
patents on MP3 (dunno which ones) supposedly expire. But that's still a 
whole 13+ months away (the whole life-cycle of Fedora 10!).

Speaking about Video, maybe an area (in Multimedia) that would be worth 
investing development and time testing is just video-encoding and 
editing using free formats (theora). Many times in the past I tried to 
transcode some of the videos I own (whether it be DVD or downloaded 
free-videos) to theora. Once I wanted to conduct a quality comparison 
between theora, MPEG-4 and h264, but I could never find a good and 
reliable theora encoder. I do believe that ffmpeg (another restricted 
package) does support transcoding to theora, but is there a stand-alone 
theora encoder?