Fedora Core 5 Test 3 Review

Gain Paolo Mureddu gmureddu at prodigy.net.mx
Sun Mar 12 20:35:58 UTC 2006


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Tommy Reynolds wrote:

>
> Exactly what MP3 education are we *actively* conducting?
>
> Install a multimedia player, point it to an .mp3 file and get a
> simple razz-berry that "we don't support mp3; you're screwed"
> message?
>
> If the licensing hassle is Fedora distributing the decoder, say so
> and then point folks where to get the stuff directly. When RH 8
> dropped the support, at least there was an education page:
>
> http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html
>
> to help out. Simply telling newbies who want to try Fedora that
> their 500 GB of mp3 songs can't be played loses their attention
> rather quickly. It's all very well to not ship mp3 decoders, but
> since other distro's do, we can't just take the high road and
> babble on about OGG, et. al. without explaining the migration path.
>
>
> *Is* there a migration path from MP3 to OGG?
>
> End users want to use Fedora to solve their problems: let's help
> them scratch their itch, not wave poison ivy about.

To me the most "satisfactory" answer would be to redirect them to a
media player that will get them what they want and which is available
for Linux: RealPlayer. Granted we've got HelixPlayer (the core of
Real), but (again) with mp3 support disabled. That would be about the
*most* legitimate way to paliate the issue, IMO.

It would be even better if when trying to open an .mp3 in Helix a
dialog pop up and asks to "update" Helix to Real, so that users could
"effortlessly" enjoy their mp3s with a (small) download handled
automagically and only asking their root's password for the final
installation (or whatever). However this solution heavily depends on
Real.com allowing doing that from within Helix on voiced non-mp3
supporters like Fedora (or Debian, for that matter). This would
actually benefit Real, as their player would be more and more used by
Linux new commers, however last I saw their license it was rather
restricive on the re-distribution, and an accord must be in place with
the Fedora Project or Foundation prior for the project to be able to
include such a feature, and even that may not be high on the priority
list of many Fedora developers, so it would be pushed back or rejected
altogether, even when such a feature would result in broader adoption
of Fedora (for example) since it nicely interoperates with Real. If
the users don't like RealPlayer, there's always the more underground
solutions (like adding gstreamer plugins and the like), but that would
then be responsiblity of the user, not the distribution.
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