Tero Pesonen wrote:
On Thursday 09 August 2007, Fergus Wilde wrote:
he proprietary video formats issue is one for the lawyers, not Linux
people. These formats don't play back because copyright and patent
owners or abusers will not allow free access to them and have
threatened and bullied, and even prosecuted, people trying simply to
view files using open source systems.
This distinction is extremely important. Badger your government about
it, not those working on Linux multimedia, who have shown time and
again that they can easily overcome any technical issues when not
threatened by corporations and their legal teams.
I do understand this. I'm not blaming people working on opensource
multimedia -- they are the people who make it possible for me to view
these videos! The problem is, that an average user coming from Windows
does not (based on my experience) know anything about the whys and hows
relating to video codecs on opensource platforms. If things won't just
work out of the box or with the install of a media player, the said
things become an issue. Most people have never even heard of video codecs
in their life. They just start Windows Mediaplayer or whatever and open
the video file, or as is often the case, the video source or file
automatically opens the correct player.
On Linux I've always had to manually find and install the codecs. I don't
know if the latest SUSE has changed that, or what is the case on Ubuntu
or others popular now. It is no problem at all to me. It could be a
problem to many others though.
FWIW, a friend has an IBM ThinkPad, that came loaded with Windows 98. A
couple of years ago, she upgraded to XP and found she could no longer
play video DVDs. After some checking, we found that she has to buy the
necessary software, from a web site that's very irritating and difficult
to navigate through. She decided against providing her credit card info
and went without DVD video playback. Another issue is when you install
such things, you often get a load of crapware along with it. So, it is
not always so easy for Windows users either.
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