promoting free media codecs from GNOME

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi,

When we worked on gnome-sound-recorder for GNOME 2.6 I added a simple
library for encoding profiles to couple human-readable names to codec
formats and settings.  When doing this I chose free codecs for all of
these (Vorbis, FLAC and wav).   I chose this because by default I would
like us to promote the use of unencumbered codecs.

Personally I want to work on some more parts of the GNOME desktop where
this could be useful (sound-juicer and some way of easily converting
audio files from within nautilus come to mind immediately).

With a bitstream-stable Theora video codec less than a month away this
will also mean that we can start thinking about tools that produce video
instead of just playback.

Do people think that promoting the use of free codecs (ie, enabling
those by default, and only use those out of the box) is the right way to
go ?

Of course distributions are still free to customize GNOME and add in
different profiles for other codecs, but as a source platform I strongly
believe we should only advocate using the unencumbered ones, where xiph
is the largest collection of these.

Thomas

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