----- Original Message -----
This is a good point. I'd say that these days people watch videos
more
in a browser than in a desktop player and installing anything from
Flathub is currently not going to help them in any way. Firefox and
Chromium rely on libavcodec in the system. No matter if Totem is
included or installed from Flathub, nothing changes for them: Wanna
play videos? Go and enable that 3rd party repo and install ffmpeg. And
once that repo is enabled, Software can AFAIK install required
GStreamer plugins in a few clicks.
I also wonder whether we should continue in our efforts to include as
many video codecs as legally possible (adding support for H.264
playback etc.). What would the consumer of it? Totem would be gone and
browsers use libavcodec.
Firefox can also use OpenH264, so it should be able to play more things
in the future. However, the breadth of codecs a web browser needs
is not the same as the one required for a movie player in any case, so
that still wouldn't quite be enough.
And I'm guessing that for most users, there's no figuring out why Firefox
can't play things, it goes straight to installing a browser that can
play those things, usually Google Chrome.
We ship: Firefox, GNOME Videos
Users probably end up installing (from Google, RPMFusion or somewhere
else): Chrome, VLC