[Slightly OT] Re: Ranter or evangelist?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 07/28/2009 09:56 AM, gilpel at altern.org wrote:

> Tim replied that asx files were needed in pages where the video is
> embedded. You didn't answer Tim.

It wasn't a question. I didn't find any need to answer it.  I have no
need to watch the site in question and the problems in that site is of
no personal concern to me.

> So, maybe it would be better to include Gnome MPlayer. Then, when people
> would go to rpmfind, they would get the MPlayer codecs and plugins for
> Firefox.
> 
> If I got anything wrong, I will be pleased to be corrected.

Yes. You have been told many times already. Fedora CANNOT include
mplayer due to legal reasons (ie) some of these codecs infringe on US
patents and redistribution of codecs for a distribution legally based in
US would invite lawsuits. Microsoft Windows can include it because they
pay patent royalties and charge you for the product. Fedora does not.

Whether it is technically better or not is irrelevant since Fedora
cannot include it. Totem is included because it uses gstreamer and
gstreamer cleanly separates codecs. Codecs that can be included by
everybody and good quality (good), codecs that are of not good enough
quality (bad), misc (bad-extras), codecs that are good quality but have
patent issues (ugly) and finally a interface to ffmeg (gstreamer-ffmeg).

Xine has also been split up in a similar fashion in Fedora. Mplayer is
more trickier but even if it was done, net effect is the same. Codecs
which have patent issues (including WMV, mp3, mpeg et all) will not be
supported out of the box anytime soon in Fedora.

Rahul