Restricted extra/addons

[Daniel van Vugt]

Bryan,

You read my mind. I was in the process of finding out how to add to the 
list :)

Although gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad does have important uses such as 
providing audio codecs and the GL plugin, totem will install it on 
demand, anyway. So yes you should be able to drop it.

I would like to add a couple to that list though:
  - va-driver-all (should include i965-va-driver)
  - gstreamer1.0-vaapi

Those together with some fixes I am working on for them will give Totem 
hardware accelerated video decoding out-of-the box.

For more information about my intention see:
   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelQuickSyncVideo

P.S. gstreamer1.0-libav is a misnomer:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gst-libav1.0/+bug/1694409

- Daniel


On 02/08/17 00:18, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Been looking at what's brought in by default by the restricted
> checkbox in the installer and I think we can have better defaults.
> Here is a brief summary of what we have today:
> 
> ubuntu-restricted-addons (what the installer checkbox does)
>   - Flash
>   - gstreamer1.0-fluendo-mp3
>   - chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra
>   - gstreamer1.0-libav (and dependencies are 114 MB)
>   - gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly (just 5 MB)
>   - gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad (314 MB)
> 
> ubuntu-restricted-extras (what we recommend if on installed system)
>   - the above ubuntu-restricted-addons
>   - libavcodec-extra
>   - ttf-mscorefonts-installer
>   - unrar
> 
> Proposals (all just affect being in the metapackages, not in
> archives).  I'm envisioning ending the -extras package.
> 
> Flash - remove
> Adobe is officially killing it entirely at end of 2020 -
> https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html
> Apparently Mac OS may have stopped including it by default in *2010*.
> Mozilla (and all browser vendors) will make Flash more inconvenient to
> use in the 2nd half of 2018.  Requiring people to specifically install
> it will make it easier to determine how many Ubuntu users actually
> really want Flash.
> 
> gstreamer1.0-fluendo-mp3 - hoping we can provide MP3 support by
> default soon like Fedora just did (right?).  Still on track for 18.04
> or can that be pushed up?
> 
> gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad - remove
> This is by far the heaviest item we bring in and from what I can tell
> libav and ugly really cover the majority of codecs most people will
> run into.   Bad plugins also likely provide an easy security target as
> they say they have code quality issues.
> 
> unrar - remove
> One of the biggest uses is with comic books, but apparently that can
> be done for free these days -
> http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/evince-3-26-will-let-view-adobe-illustrator-cbr-files
> I also don't expect the use of unrar to be anywhere near the tasks the
> other packages enables.
> 
> libavcodec-extra  - remove or move to -addons
> no preference, doesn't seem like size is the issue
> 
> ttf-mscorefonts-installer - promote to -addons
> Fonts missing is one of the biggest reasons documents in LibreOffice
> don't like they do in MS Office.
> 
> Thanks!
> Bryan
>