everyday multimedia not supported in Ubuntu (Re: 3 days from the release, 3 machines, a few issues.

[Ryan Thiessen]

> if linux is to become a commonly used desktop system, then this would
> have to become the case. i know that i personally enjoying the
> tweaking and hunting that i do to make my machine what it is, but my
> friends are put off by simply putting in the XP disc and rebooting
> their machine to install it. i like this idea of a wizard-system,
> except i would feel a little guilty having everything handed to me
> (after several years in a linux world).

Related to this, instead of complaining to the busy Ubuntu developers
about a problem that is out of their control I sponsored work on the
totem-mozilla plugin.  Hopefully soon enough we'll be able to use
totem-xine and/or totem-gstreamer to watch videos in mozilla based
browsers like Epiphany and Firefox without having to rely on
unsupported and legally queasy (depending on your jurisdiction of
course) tools like mplayer.  According to the developers, they are
making significant progress with this and will likely be included in a
future Totem release.

At that point we could hope to get it included with Ubuntu, and the
freely distributable codecs could work by default -- and if you have
the xine/gstreamer plugins you could watch nonfree media if your
jursidiction allows it.  So, the situation as is exists now is
admittedly imperfect, but hope is on the way... and shouldn't be too
much longer before we have a very good solution to this problem.

-- 
Cheers,
-rt-