Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

[Les Mikesell]

Ric Moore wrote:
>>
>> As Rahul mentioned, newbs don't care about extensions. In fact, if
>> they have been running Windows, they have been conditioned to not know
>> that extensions even *exist* since Windows hides them by default (one
>> of my big pet peeves) and finding the dialog to enable them is not
>> newbie friendly.
>>
>> I know where you are coming from but I don't think that this will be
>> traumatizing for newbs and may be somewhat simplifying since they just
>> have to know that it is media ... not audio media or video media and
>> have to find the right player.
> 
> Mplayer does that nicely, regardless of the extension. I think quite of
> few of us are showing DOS roots here. If all I need to do is click and
> it works, that's a step up, IMHO. As Rahul mentioned, the desktop icon
> will reveal what the file is, regardless of extension. 

Itunes really has the best interface model here: interact only with the 
internal name for an item and don't ever make the user even know about 
an underlying file and its name or location.  If you do have a reason to 
need access to the file, let the interface do it for you by interacting 
with the visible name.  For example, itunes will let you use any/all of 
its playlist selection tools to get a set of names in a list - and if 
you want to do something with the files you can just select some names 
and drag them off to another location like a folder or USB connected 
drive.  You don't need to know anything about the underlying filenames, 
extensions or storage locations to do this.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com