Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Re: rhythmbox: gstreamer vs xine

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hey Miguel,

> Hi Thomas,
> 
> > I'll be sad to not see Rhythmbox in Red Hat 8.1.  While it was far
> > from finished, I was looking forward to at least being able to
> > recommend it to a whole bunch of people I know, and at the college
> > radio I also work at in my spare time (they moved to RH exclusively
> > last year, finally).
> 
> Just curious... you said that rhythmbox won't be in RH 8.1 and, if i
> understood it right, that is because the dependency on libxine, right?

Yeah, that was my reasoning.  Xine got pulled from 8.0 at the last minute 
as well - it was in the beta for it.
But, as Jorn mailed, he never wanted RB in Red Hat 8.1 in the first place, 
so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference nayway.

> well, this is something that really puzzles me: redhat removed xine,
> xmms mp3 support and other (?) software from their distro because of
> patent issues. now it is including gstreamer and multimedia stuff back
> in? how is that possible?

Because GStreamer itself is type-agnostic.  All of the functionality and 
type handling is provided by plug-ins.  This was one of the design goals 
at the very start, and patent issues is one reason for it.  Red Hat
ships plug-ins that are totally free, like vorbis, audio effects, and some 
other things.

> i never tried gstreamer, so maybe the core itself doesn't contain any
> patented code (so in this case it should only be able to play ogg, vp3?)
> or is redhat disabling some parts on compilation?

Right, the core does just data handling.  As for how to actually disable 
plug-ins, any of
a) not having the right deps
b) disabling through configure
c) just not listing them in the spec
will do, so it's really easy to only distribute plugins you want to 
distribute.

> i would love to see that problems with patents solved, as well seeing
> gnome/kde/redhat/mandrake/suse/whatever users enjoying high quality
> multimedia experience. i just don't know what would be the point in
> including packages in a cripped form (like not being able to play mp3,
> because like we or not it's a de fact standard).

Oh, I don't know.  I think Red Hat made a very brave move in doing this.  
Does it suck for end users ? Yeah.  Does it make people change their 
minds.  I hope so.
It changed my mind - I totally reencoded my collection of CD's on mp3 to 
vorbis since Red Hat 8.0 came out.  Reencoded, not transcoded.  I'm up to 
515 cd's in ogg now.
So it changed my mind.  I hope it has changed other people's minds as well 
- at least, the ones that are serious about music, and not just download 
stuff from the net.  I don't care if pirates can't play their downloaded 
music anymore :)

So, I don't mind.  But of course, it sucks that a standard Red Hat install 
won't allow you to play lots of the media that's out there.  But what can 
you do ? It's the patents that are the problem here.

As for how to solve it - that's easy.  We can provide the missing 
plug-ins, and as long as we can, we will :) Basically, just copying the 
.so file should be enough anyway.  And we'll be making rpms and debs as 
well.

Thomas

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