[Fedora-marketing-list] idea on explaining the mp3 question

[Rahul Sundaram]

Sam Folk-Williams wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I know this is an overly-discussed issue, but since I get so many
> questions on it I wanted to run this idea past everyone. 
> 
> A common complaint I hear is that people think Fedora is "broken" when
> it doesn't play MP3s. This leads to mailing list and forum traffic,
> negative word-of-mouth exposure, and needless confusion. 
> 
> I think the problem is that when you try to play an MP3 file... nothing
> happens at all or you get an ugly codec message -- both of these indeed
> seem to indicate something is broken. Why not have a pop up that
> explains why Fedora doesn't play MP3s and give a link to the wiki where
> it is explained in further detail?

We had a dialog box popup when trying to play MP3 in XMMS in earlier Red 
Hat Linux releases.  That didnt have much of a benefit though for 
whatever reasons. The problem was that we had a number of different 
players and the user experience on some was worse than the others.

> I could file an RFE on this.... I think it would cut down on the
> confusion. Has this been previously discussed? Thoughts?

Now that we have mostly settled down on Rhythmbox by default and 
Gstreamer as the multimedia framework that can be shared across desktop 
environments etc, its easier to do this. You can file a RFE against the 
"distribution" component instead of specific players so we that if we 
implement anything, we do it across the players we provide. Should 
probably look at installing the fluendo plugin after a agreement or 
things like that depending on how far we need to extend support to this.

Rahul