Re: [jokosher-devel] Proprietary codecs

[Laszlo Pandy <laszlok2 gmail com>]

John Green wrote:
> A bug report has been raised about Jokosher needing to support the feisty
> way of dealing with missing codecs.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/jokosher/+bug/84758
>
> I haven't looked at the technical specifics but I did want to discuss
> whether core Jokosher was the right place to be dealing with
> distribution-specific issues. Isn't this a job for Ubuntu packagers? Can't
> distributions apply their own patches for their own reasons and apt-get
> source reveals the original code along with the patches? 

I have read all the docs on the ubuntu wiki and the gstreamer page I can 
find regarding this (there aren't many since its so new), and this is 
how I think it would work. If it can't play some audio, Gstreamer will 
send a "missing-plugin"[1] message on the bus. Note that this not only 
handles missing codecs, but also unknown protocols such as "mms://".
Once we receive the message and the details of what is missing, we call 
an external process "gnome-app-install --codec=<some-missing-thing>".

I think we should handle this, simple because Gstreamer is providing it 
(so it *is* distro agnostic) and it would be pretty trivial to support. 
However, there are currently no released distros that support it, so 
testing it might be difficult. The only distro that will support it in 
the near future AFAIK is Ubuntu Fiesty.

Until it gets some widespread accpetance, I think telling people to 
"Open up the file in totem, and it will install the plugin for you" will 
do. And since we are in feature freeze, its probably gonna have to be a 
1.0 feature anyway.

[1] 
http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/docs/random/draft-missing-plugins.txt?view=markup