Interesting article

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Ralph,

While I agree with some things you said:

>Not one Linux distro I've seen does a convincing job with consumer
>media, an absolutely basic requirement, and something we ought to be
>able to get right.

Well, please ask the DVD people not to used royalty bearing patents in
their codecs, and encryption practices that would have the DMCA down on
the headquarters of Fedora, OpenSUSE and others.

>movie or sound file

H.264?  Mpeg3/4/2?

Have your friends send you Ogg Vorbis stuff.  Plays fine.

Apple and Microsoft have paid up royalties on these things (or at least
Microsoft thought it had paid up royalties on mp3 until Alcatel/Lucent
raised their hand a couple of years ago), so they can ship as many
royalty-bearing codecs as they want.

I was looking into what it would take in the way of patent royalties to
put Android onto the Openmoko phone.  It was a mess, even just paying
the royalties on a hardware basis.  But people can not afford to pay the
royalties on free CDs that they give away and may never even
install...or royalties for downloads that may not even make it to CDs.

Sooo, installing these codecs is a "research project" as you call it.

>However, if Linux were an attractive entertainment platform in all
>other ways, I suspect people would put it on their computers for that -
>can't beat the price - and then companies would start writing games for
>the platform. Until you can at least play a DVD after first boot,
>forget it. Too much trouble. Not even close.

There were a couple of projects that did this.  LinuxMCE comes to mind.
There were even companies that had products based on it.

Hmmm, LinuxMCE seems to have gotten a new lease on life.  I may try it
again.

md