On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 3:22 PM Bastien Nocera <bnocera(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hey,
I wanted to gauge interest for this particular solution to a long-standing
problem, that of being able to play back videos in the user's possession.
TL;DR: Remove totem so that users get it from a place where it can play
videos
I don't understand how removing Totem from the default installation (or
even completely from Fedora), without a replacement, helps end users. How
is their situation supposed to get improved with this step? Power users
will manage, but the group which actually liked a simple-interface video
player like Totem (or perhaps used it as a default video player for their
parents - my case) will need to look for a new one. General users will be
clueless and will search the Internet, discovering broken outdated guides
all around (of course, that's the same situation as with missing codecs.
Also, we're talking just about users from countries where software patents
don't apply, obviously). Additionally, if the video player is present but
can't play the content, at least a reasonable message can be presented to
the user, perhaps with some guidance and links (example
<
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia>). If the player is not
installed at all, the user is left completely in the dark. Overall, by
removing the video player, I don't see improvements in any of those cases,
and I see more complications for some of them.
Also, having a Workstation product without a pre-installed video player is
guaranteed to get bad press (and I don't mean just journalists, but user
opinions). Suddenly, "Fedora" can't even play open-source codecs by
default. Our mission is to "advance software and content freedom", but we
wouldn't be even able to play FOSS content out-of-the-box? That's really...
weird.
It seems ironic to me that such a proposal would arrive in a time when
we're in the best situation ever, compared to history. Many codecs patents
expired lately (mostly audio, true) and we can play them reasonably well.
VP8 and VP9 are used on a massive scale (YouTube), even though in
situations where common users don't interact with them (unless you download
videos from YouTube, I do). WebM hasn't made the impact we wished for, but
you can still see it from time to time, particularly with FOSS-related
events. Hopefully AV1 will change this. Overall, it's not much, yes, but
it's still better than it used to be (at least that's my perception). And I
believe I saw a claim somewhere (can't remember where) that we could get
higher profile support in openh264 in a near future (perhaps Christian can
comment on this). That would of course flip this whole discussion upside
down, because suddenly we'd be able to play the most widespread video codec.