codec support

[Corey Burger]

On 8/2/06, Darryl Moore <darryl at moores.ca> wrote:
> Hi all, I was just on slashdot where part of the discussion
>
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/1815256
>
> was on the fact that event Ubuntu comes with popular codecs disabled,
> requiring extra work for the user to enable them. This is a barrier for
> the very demographic that Ubuntu is targeting.
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
>
> This is largely a response to US DMCA legislation. Since the rest of the
> world (Australia excepted) does not have DMCA style legislation, does
> anyone here have any interest in repackaging Ubuntu to include those
> codecs by default.
>
> It could be a fun project which might highlight some software patent and
> DMCA issues.
>
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192928&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=15834909
>
>
> cheers,
> darryl

Those codecs are, in fact, already packaged by default. They are
merely part of the multiverse repository. The only thing missing is
w32codecs (which are legally grey due to copyright issues, as they are
direct copies of the windows codecs) and decss (which the DVD assoc is
quite sue happy over). The codecs which are packaged are in
gstreamer0.10 plugins packages bad and ugly.

Corey