DVD (video) and Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Martin Sourada wrote:

> That's not what I meant. They are forcing you to use format they've
> chosen and it does not matter if it's patent encumbered or not, the idea
> is that you are restricting choice and forcing your users to use what
> you think is good for them.

It does matter whether it is patent encumbered or not. Even if you only 
one format to pick and what you have is not patent encumbered, everybody 
is free to use it. Remember that Firefox is a cross platform application 
and itself a platform and cannot rely on gstreamer being available. 
Bundling gstreamer with Firefox is worse than bundling liboggplay.

> Yes, it uses various backends depending on platform for <video>/<audio>
> tags, in linux it's most likely gstreamer both for GTK a and QT, which
> basically means that on our platform it supports whatever gstreamer
> supports (depends on what plugins you have installed). Meaning in webkit
> you'll be able to play same range of videos you can with totem, while in
> firefox you'll be restricted to open source, not patented codecs and ogg
> format. Well, we'll see if the <video> tags will actually be used and
> how...

Supporting one codec natively on all the platforms makes it easier for 
websites to rely on what is available consistently. You can bet Apple 
which controls WebKit won't be using gstreamer on other platforms which 
means you cannot rely on any codec support being available natively.

a) WebKit is not popular enough to make a difference and support for 
codecs is very fragmented (no support in Chrome, differs depending on 
the operating system, browser etc)

b) Linux is not popular enough on desktops to make a difference

It takes a popular cross platform FOSS app like Firefox to even stand a 
fighting chance.

Rahul