[Fwd: [Bug 163675] mpeg situation not explained in documentation]

[Nicu Buculei]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> I'm punting this over to the marketing side.  The consensus on #fedora-
> docs is this:
> 
> a) Fedora has not done a very good job of loudly advertising why we
> don't distribute certain codecs, although we do spend a lot of time
> addressing the topic in other ways.
> 
> b) The complaint about multimedia is in every poorly researched review. 
> 
> c) This is the latest stick to beat Fedora with.
> 
> d) An official rebuttal/comment on the situation might help.
> 
> Any ideas on this?

I believe the best thing to do is what the original poster suggested in 
Bugzilla:
"It would also be good (although I realise that this is the wrong place 
for that) if stubs were installed for the missing components which 
explain the situation. This has been done for xmms, but I think that's 
the only place. The other affected programs just display very generic 
and uninformative error messages, or they are just mysteriously missing."

I expect if such a stub is made as a gstreamer plugin, the majority of 
multimedia apps in Fedora will be covered.

If the situation is clarified at the application level then I find 
enough for release notes to mention it in a secondary, non-prominent place.

BTW, as this is a marketing list, when we will have and advertise some 
mind-blowing multimedia applications based on free codecs to fill this void?

-- 
nicu
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