Mon, 09 Jun 2014
Politically Correct Media Players
Hello, welcome to today's issue of your favourite "Bashing the Questionable Fedora Desktop Decisions" series. Today, we will have a look at the politically correct media players.
In a civilized world, there is no place for such insane things like software patents. Unfortunately, there are less free parts of the world, which includes the United States of America. So the companies originating in the U.S. are forced to do absurd decisions like shipping audio players which really cannot play most of the audio files out there (which are, unfortunately, stored in the inferior MP3 format), or video players which cannot play almost any video (which can be encoded in wide variety formats, almost all encumbered by software patents).
For Fedora, the clean solution would be to have a package repository outside
the U.S. jurisdiction, and offer it as a part of Fedora by default.
Such a repository already exists at
rpmfusion.org,
and it provides everything needed to play audio and video in free parts
of the world. But it is not as promoted as it should be in free parts
of the world. However, Fedora does something different: they ship empty shells
of audio and video players, such as Pragha or Totem, which in fact cannot
play most of the audio and video files. The problem is, that these applications
shamelessly register themselves as the handlers of audio/mp3,
video/h264, and similar MIME types. Only after the media file
is handed to them, they start to complain that they don't have an appropriate
plug-in installed.
Hey, Fedora desktop maintainers, stop pretending that the US-based Fedora desktops can handle MP3 and H.264 files, and admit that your inferior but not U.S. software-patent encumbered players cannot handle these files by default. It would be fair to your users. Fedora users: is there anybody who really uses Totem instead of VLC or Mplayer?