On Saturday 27 January 2007 18:20, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
As I recently discovered it is not very easy to enable mp3 on most media players of OpenSuSE (except RealPlayer).
Actually it is very easy: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=509097 (that took roughly five seconds to find - or less time than to type this email)
I am getting upset for this, because this might block a lot of non-techie user using SuSE (after all RealPlayer is not the default player in SuSE). Maybe I am doing something stupid (I am only a one year old SuSE user after all, and not a community organization expert) but I wish to call SuSE user and developer's attention to this issue so that:
I. as a best solution, motivate opensuse to enable mp3 by default on bmp, xmms, banshee, rhymbox, gstreamer (including totem) and all players;
Here you go: http://www.novell.com/company/contact.html # Corporate Address: 404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 # Phone: 800-529-3400 (toll free) or 801-861-1329 (Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–8 p.m. EST) # E-mail: crc@novell.com
II. as a fall back solution, let's collect solutions on how to enalbe mp3 on various players and make sure end users can easily find these solution, and these solutions are not too complex. These solutions must make their way on the web so that users can find them very easily, things appear in second google search result won't be a lot helpful for users. (I knew there are already a lot of "solutions" but they are often either not easy to find or doesn't work. Check my ealier post.) III. if OpenSuSE decide not to enable mp3 support because it's not "Free" by GNU definition, at least we can try to submit some patches and make these patchs gets into opensuse so that when a music play failed to play mp3, it prompts with some user-friendly message that you need to look up this and that webpage for solutions on how to enable mp3 support.
I myself am still looking for solution to enable mp3 on either Banshee or Rthymbox. Looks so far Banshee it's easiler to find a solution for Banshee. I am still working on it.
check above. HTH!
Study shows not every "ordinary users" actually use google to search for a solution when they got a problem. So if people have to search for how to enable mp3, we already know many people has given up. And also study shows even in opensource world, only 1/7 people go ask questions on forum or mailing list. So if a google search doesn't leads to a workable solution, 6/7 people perhaps give up, only 1/7 will post something like me. Well perhaps only a very few percent will have a true hacker's spirit and hack down a solution when questions on forum/lists doesn't get a solution.
P.S. I read some forum threads saying SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop have mp3 enabled by default. Is this ture? If so I'd like to try it and recommend other people to use that one in place of opensuse provide it's not too expensive for most users.
P.S. "If it's not working, source is there and why not work it out yourself?" Well, I'd be glad to hack the source to solve it myself IF THE MUSIC PLAYER don't support MP3 NATIVELY. But the mp3 problem we are facing is already solved by all Linux music players, the situation is music players support mp3, SuSE removed it. So this is a non-technical issue.
It is more of a licence than a technical issue. Somebody sliipped through the pathetic idea that software should be patentable. This has - of course - ruined many lives and generally been regarded as a poor decision. -- kai www.perfectreign.com || www.4thedadz.com www.filesite.org || www.donutmonster.com closing the doors that surround me so no one will ever penetrate complete my retreat just to wait for the day that never comes so i will laugh alone -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org