DVD (video) and Fedora (was: FEL's commitment lineup)

[Bastien Nocera]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 06:27 -0500, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 00:17 -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > You could put Theora (+Vorbis) in MKV, in theory, and I think people
> > have done it before, but I know it doesn't work right in many (most?
> > virtually all?) mkv supporting apps.   I'd say that would be something
> > worth fixing, since there are a lot of complex features in MKV that no
> > one has done for Ogg (like menus) except that I could still never
> > recommend mkv files to people, since free codecs in MKV pretty much
> > only theoretically possible (like non-free codecs in Ogg are
> > theoretically possible, but not something you're likely to find).  For
> > Fedora we wouldn't want to recommend MKV for users simply because
> > there is a 99.9999% chance of any random mkv file not working for
> > them.
> 
> Most apps/libraries have the container demuxer tightly coupled to the
> codec engine.

Apps are thus broken.

>  The only exception to that is gstreamer, so only
> gstreamer-based apps are capable of playing such a file.

xine-lib, mplayer, and many others split the demuxing from the decoding.

I still don't see where this discussion is taking us. If a decoder is
missing for the data in a Matroska (or Ogg) container, you should get a
nice popup asking you to install the decoder through PackageKit.

Feel free to file a bug upstream if Matroska files don't play with
Theora video. Just as an FYI, those 2 files (one with Theora video, one
with Vorbis audio) play just fine in F10:
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/Matroska/theora.mkv
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/Matroska/mewmew/mewmew-vorbis-ssa.mkv

Cheers