Re: Removing GNOME Videos?

[Kamil Paral <kparal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 3:22 PM Bastien Nocera <bnocera@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hey,

I wanted to gauge interest for this particular solution to a long-standing
problem, that of being able to play back videos in the user's possession.

TL;DR: Remove totem so that users get it from a place where it can play videos

I don't understand how removing Totem from the default installation (or even completely from Fedora), without a replacement, helps end users. How is their situation supposed to get improved with this step? Power users will manage, but the group which actually liked a simple-interface video player like Totem (or perhaps used it as a default video player for their parents - my case) will need to look for a new one. General users will be clueless and will search the Internet, discovering broken outdated guides all around (of course, that's the same situation as with missing codecs. Also, we're talking just about users from countries where software patents don't apply, obviously). Additionally, if the video player is present but can't play the content, at least a reasonable message can be presented to the user, perhaps with some guidance and links (example). If the player is not installed at all, the user is left completely in the dark. Overall, by removing the video player, I don't see improvements in any of those cases, and I see more complications for some of them.

Also, having a Workstation product without a pre-installed video player is guaranteed to get bad press (and I don't mean just journalists, but user opinions). Suddenly, "Fedora" can't even play open-source codecs by default. Our mission is to "advance software and content freedom", but we wouldn't be even able to play FOSS content out-of-the-box? That's really... weird.

It seems ironic to me that such a proposal would arrive in a time when we're in the best situation ever, compared to history. Many codecs patents expired lately (mostly audio, true) and we can play them reasonably well. VP8 and VP9 are used on a massive scale (YouTube), even though in situations where common users don't interact with them (unless you download videos from YouTube, I do). WebM hasn't made the impact we wished for, but you can still see it from time to time, particularly with FOSS-related events. Hopefully AV1 will change this. Overall, it's not much, yes, but it's still better than it used to be (at least that's my perception). And I believe I saw a claim somewhere (can't remember where) that we could get higher profile support in openh264 in a near future (perhaps Christian can comment on this). That would of course flip this whole discussion upside down, because suddenly we'd be able to play the most widespread video codec.

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