Re: promoting free media codecs from GNOME

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 12:54 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> 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.

I completely agree with all this. As long as the codecs/profiles still
label the human readable names of the codecs.
I would really hate to select a codec for which the description sounds
like MP3, but is in reality Ogg Vorbis, when I need MP3 ;)

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.