DVD (video) and Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Martin Sourada wrote:

> Yes bundling gstreamer with Firefox would be nuts. But bundling
> liboggplay isn't a perfectly good thing either. You should rely on what
> the host platforms offers (though it's usually easier to do such thing
> on *nix platforms...)

The host platform offers no support for open video. So the choice is 
either nothing or bundling it or fragmented supported. Firefox chose to 
bundle support natively.

> No, they won't be. They're using whatever framework there is on mac and
> they'll be using whatever framework is default on windows. It's no
> different from video intended from download - you rely on the customer
> to install the needed codecs himself.

Then there is no added advantage. If the users have to download codecs, 
they might as well as download the Flash plugin.

> If you have less to offer than concurrence you have much worse starting
> position. We should rather focus our efforts on improving FLOSS
> codecs/formats (which is good that there are people actually working on
> it; and fighting against software patents) so that it would not be a
> step back (in terms of quality/features/compression) to switch from say
> h264 to dirac. M

It will very likely, always be that way. Multimedia is patent hell. 
While we can try and do all of the above as we always have, having 
Firefox support it natively is a *big* difference .

atroska, ogg, vorbis and flac are doing pretty well, but
> we still don't have a competing video codec(s). Also the support of
> patent encumbered but open sourced codecs (like x264) is even better
> than for the FLOSS ones on linux - as someone already said, try to play
> e.g. mkv with theora in xine...

This is just a obscure bug that needs to be fixed. It just hasn't been a 
issue because theora is only used with Ogg as a container in practise. 
Report it and get it fixed neverthless.

> I fear that the only-ogg format and FLOSS codecs support in firefox will
> be rather a chance for other browsers to stand a fighting chance with
> firefox than a chance for theora...

Sure. I understand you don't particularly like Firefox and prefer WebKit 
but it isn't good to turn a blind eye to the problem that there is no 
good and compact cross platform multimedia framework that any 
application can rely on yet.

Rahul