Tony Nelson wrote:
Fairly put. I have a modest proposal that supports Fedora's principles.
It would help for new users to be shown Fedora's reasoning when they try to
play content that requires a missing (non-free) codec. On fedora-list, new
users tend to start with questions about how to burn the CDs, then ask
about booting (either their video card or grub), and then ask about not
being able to play certain content ("Why are these useless players even
installed? They won't play /anything/!"). And only a few novice Fedora
users even find the fedora-list!
They play the unencumbered codecs very well and that's what we intend to
support by default.
I suggest that Fedora-specific patches be added to the standard players, at
least the ones in the Gnome menus, so that when something can't be played
because it requires a missing (non-free) codec, a useful dialog appears,
explaining that there are legal issues that prevent providing the required
codec with a link to a fuller explanation of the issue. This should work
better than expecting the average user to read and remember the entire
Release Notes. I know Fedora prefers to push patches upstream, but this is
a special case. (No, I'm not volunteering, as I don't use or maintain any
of the players and would therefor be little help, and my only benefit would
be seeing fewer plaints on fedora-list.)
If there is a common place where a single patch would affect all players,
that would be better. I don't think such a place exists, but I'm no expert.
XMMS used to have something like this back in the Red Hat Linux 9 days.
With the diverse number of media players this is now more harder.
Gstreamer would be the right place add some hooks and enable this now.
This was one of the items discussed in Fedora summit.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit
Missing (non-free) firmware is another issue that might have a similar
solution?
Potentially. We need to sort out the implementation details and someone
has to do the actual development.
Rahul
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