----- Original Message -----
Personally, I don't think putting forth effort into missing codec
installation makes much sense. Since this feature isn't working well,
we might as well just disable it.
It's not working well, but it's still working. Even if you were to disable
it for totem, all the other GStreamer apps are still potential consumers.
If you have to enable rpmfusion to
get the missing codec workflow to work, well, users who are smart
enough to do that can just install the codecs they want anyway.
This is exactly it. And I'd rather have them find a version that doesn't
require hunting down codecs and has (most of) all the bits upfront.
It's
better to ensure that we install whatever important codecs we can by
default.
That's certainly a laudable goal, but until all the patents have expired,
and the industry uses patent-free codecs, not an option for Fedora.
I think totem is still useful though. MP4 and AAC are both coming
soon,
right, and it's expected to be good enough to play most MP4 files,
including web videos? Why do you say they are "rather incomplete"?
The OpenH264 plugin only supports baseline profile, from gst-inspect-1.0:
Capabilities:
video/x-h264
stream-format: byte-stream
alignment: au
profile: { (string)constrained-baseline, (string)baseline }
We would want at least High Profile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles
There's still no AAC GStreamer plugin shipped in Fedora, and FDK-AAC won't
have HE-AAC decoding support, which isn't yet a problem, but could be soon.
Even
without MP4, it's still helpful to be capable of playing WebM, e.g.
gnome-shell screencasts.
An actual screencast application could do this. So could sushi (nautilus'
preview app, press the space bar in your file manager). Note that if there
*must* be a player for those screencasts, I'm happy to write the smallest
of video players that would only support WebM.