On 2/20/19 9:41 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> 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 will search the Internet, discovering broken outdated guides all around (of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 ). 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.
>
> GNOME Videos will still be available, from here:
> https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Totem
> with all the bells and whistles.

How people will find about it? GNOME Software? if true, why it is fine
to show on GNOME Software an application full of patented codecs vs
showing a codec pack from rpmfusion? I mean the legal aspects of not
adding rpmfusion as a repository are known, but I don't find any
difference with flathub then.

>
> I think that, out-of-the-box, clicking on "Install" on this website will lead
> to a better experience than 1) finding out about third-party RPM repositories
> 2) enabling said repositories 3) triggering the codecs to be installed, including
> the aforementioned PackageKit-gstreamer helper bugs
>
> I intend to advertise the upstream distribution of totem via my own blog, and
> Fedora Magazine (which apparently can link to Flathub without problems).
>
>> 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.
>
> Not to find false equivalences, but we don't ship with a mail client
> out-of-the-box either.
>
> I'd really rather not have the application available in Fedora, than have it
> be a cut-down version that's really hard to extend. In the end, the end-users
> will go the way you mentioned earlier, look for a video player, and end up
> installing VLC from Flathub, instead of trying to figure out why this sucky
> video player couldn't play anything.
>
>> 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.
>
> There's a long tail of codecs that are not playable on Fedora, and will probably
> never be playable, most of them too niche to be worth spending the time to look
> whether they're covered by patents that are still running, and there's some
> already reasonable amount of videos available online as H265, which we won't be
> able to support for a while.
>
> The support is better than it's been, but it's still far from optimal, and this
> discussion only covers GStreamer codecs and demuxers, which can be detected and
> somewhat automatically installed. We also have the question of other patent-covered
> uses such as video acceleration.
>
> Cheers
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