FLOSS Multimedia Support in Fedora

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> It's another indicator that Fedora should discontinue shipping these
>> non-free media focused infrastructures rather than continuing to patch
>> the non-free stuff out.
>
> Are you volunterring to fix Phonon's GStreamer backend? It has tons of bugs.
> The xine-lib backend is the only reliable and recommended one.

I wasn't aware that it was broken, but I don't use KDE.

Fedora ought not have two parallel media codec infrastructures if it
can at all be avoided. Even if it takes more effort to fix KDE to use
GStreamer, doing so will resolve two problems (two codec
infrastructures; Free media support) rather than one (Free media
support).

>> Some of the proprietary-codecs focused tools provide their own home
>> grown implementations of the codecs (i.e. ffmpeg). These often do not
>> implement the full spec, so its important to test their behaviour.
>
> Huh? FFmpeg uses libvorbis and libtheora.

Only optionally, unfortunately. I.e. see ffmpeg libavcodec/vp3.c.

Or try playing http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/test-vectors/vorbis/lsp-test.ogg
with something that uses ffmpeg (like mplayer): crackles and sputters.
The ffmpeg Vorbis decoder doesn't implement the full spec, only the
more commonly used parts.

FFmpeg even ships its own totally broken Vorbis encoder that delivers
miserable quality even at high bitrates, which it uses if you ask for
"vorbis". :(   It's really a mess.

There is a culture of associated with many of these proprietary codec
libraries where they use their own version of everything— which
reduces dependency problems, and isn't a big deal for the non-free
codecs where their is no official version.  But at as a result of this
plus an overall indifference towards free codecs, support for the free
stuff generally stinks in these libraries.  I have no interest in
fixing FFmpeg's Theora and Vorbis codecs, they should be using the BSD
licensed reference implementations, other people with the expertise
feel the same way.  FFMpeg wants to have their own version for their
own reasons. ::shrugs:: It has been this way for years, it's an
upstream problem, and I don't think Fedora should count on fixing it,
especially since Fedora will never ship these pieces of software
except in highly patched and cut down forms.