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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Ben Boeckel <MathStuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The official recommendation is to only watch Ogg Theora content...
>> Unfortunately, there's nothing else Fedora can officially recommend.
>>
>> See also:
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#DVD_Playback
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/DVD
>>
>>         Kevin Kofler
>>
>
> There are also the matroska codecs.

Matroska is a container, like ".Ogg", ".mov", or ".avi".  It isn't a
codec. (And I'm not aware of any codecs under the Matroska moniker)

Very often Xvid (mpeg 4 part 2) or H264 (mpeg 4 part 10) is placed in
Matroska for Video. These codecs are not acceptable for Fedora.
(Vorbis is fairly common for audio in these files; though MP3 and AAC
are used too).

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.

As far as Dirac goes, it's fine stuff too, but doesn't immediately
solve any of the concerns raised with what is currently available.
Fortunately, it looks like the unencumbered media world is all playing
nice: Dirac in Ogg works in Fedora today.   So in terms of
recommendation you can just direct users to "ogg" files and whatever
they get will JustWork™ on free software including, soon, Firefox.