Re: promoting free media codecs from GNOME

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 11:15 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 11:03, Luis Villa wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 12:54 +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > > 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 ?
> > 
> > Yes. Absolutely and 100%. I do think that being able to support non-free
> > codecs/protocols is unfortunately important, but whenever it is sane we
> > should default in all our tools to pushing free equivalents of equal
> > functionality.
> 
> Well, there's one case where this could be a problem.  Say I'm ripping
> some CDs to upload them to my iPod or some other portable music player. 
> If I'm a user with little knowledge of audio formats, I'll just rip to
> the default (Ogg, perhaps?).  Then I go to use some nifty tool to upload
> to the portable music player and find out these files don't work.  My
> only options are to learn about file formats (time consuming, and many
> users will get upset if you force them to learn about stuff they'd
> rather not care about) or for the music uploader app to auto-convert the
> files (and it's not a good thing to convert one lossy audio format into
> another...).

Don't be silly. Somebody buying an iPod, or even more so for other
less-known brands/products, will know what an MP3 is, for sure.

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one
that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.