Request update of shared-mime-info

[Jon Masters]

Hi Bastien,

Thanks for your help with this. I'm glad a fix is in upstream now.

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 11:12 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-11-21 at 14:36 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> > Folks,
> > 
> > Can someone please push the update that I made (with permission) to
> > shared-mime-info? I'm getting "jcm does not have commit access" when I
> > try to make the F16 update. This fix is required to actually be able to
> > play many MP3 files (including all purchased from Amazon.com) on F16.
> 
> No, it's needed _only_ to play Amazon.com purchased files. Even if it's
> possible to create a broken file, I hardly think that trying to
> artificially raise the severity of the problem is useful.

I believe any MP3 file containing a <uits> tag will be affected. This is
the "Unique Identifier Technology Solution", which appears to be
required by a number of media distributors. Therefore, I believe (but
have not confirmed yet) that this will affect much more paid content
than just that on Amazon.com. Even if it's just "all Amazon.com music" I
believe that is a pretty significant issue.

Many users will expect to be able to download an MP3 file they purchased
legally and play it on their computer. On Fedora, this is already overly
complicated (for various well known and previously discussed reasons)
but it usually boils down to the user Googleing for "play mp3 Fedora" or
even "play music Fedora" or similar. They might be willing to take the
steps required and documented there, but they will be disappointed when
they can then not play downloaded content, especially legal content.

You are correct that it is possible to play MP3 files on Fedora 16
without this update, however I would like to politely request again that
this be pushed as an update. Separately, I did pay for you to have a
legal copy of a music file that would not play for the purposes of
ensuring that this functionality works in the future, and if someone
else would like me to "gift" them an Amazon MP3 music file for test
purposes, I would be willing to consider that also (off-list).

Jon.