Derek Hildreth’s Blog

Fedora 9 Dumps CodecBuddy

I just read about this over at LWN.net and it’s a bitter-sweet emotion for myself.

Basically, the CodecBuddy gave users the option to purchase and download codecs that would allow playback of popular media files that are otherwise illegal to us folks in the states like mp3, wmv, mov, and mpeg files. The CodecBuddy (aka Codeina) included in Fedora 8 would prompt a user to purchase proper codecs when they tried to play a particular file such as an mpeg video and directed them to the Fluendo website.

Now that the Fedora Project Board decided to scrap the inclusion of CodecBuddy in Fedora 9, I feel that the decision as a whole was a good one. The CodecBuddy didn’t actually work as planned anyways and most users of Fedora already know that there are free codecs available from the gstreamer family. The only unfortunate side of this particular family is that its legality is somewhat in a gray area.

On the other hand, I feel that it was a great opportunity for some relatively cheap codecs that might actually produce a better result in multimedia quality than what gstreamer currently has. Gstreamer is great and it gets the job done, but a lot of times I’ve found that it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss. For example, I still can’t play .avi files on my machine without terrible sound playback.

Either way, I know that the people in charge of Fedora know what they’re doing and I look forward to seeing Fedora 9.

Tags: codecbuddy, fedora, fedora 8, fedora 9, fluendo, gstreamer, Linux, multimedia