Re: Some notes on multimedia support in iceweasel

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Jonas Smedegaard]
> Beware that totem-mozilla uses either xine or gstreamer as backend
> (sorry if I am repeating myself here - I feel it is still relevant).

Sure, it is relevant.  I've so far done trivial testing, by doing
'aptitude install plugin', and then starting firefox to do the
testing.  I have not checked which configuration and support packages
were in effect.  I expect the plugin package to take care of that.

> Just using default settings might not be enough - multiple packages
> fulfill recommends so actual setup also depend on which packages are
> installed and in what order they got installed.

Sound like support hell. :/

Make me even more happy with the mplayer plugin as the default plugin
in Debian Edu/Lenny. :)

> At a minimum you should probably note which backend you used while 
> performing your tests:
> 
>    update-alternatives --list totem-default.dir
> 
> More clever would be if the script could detect the backend used.

I welcome help with the testing.  I doubt I will find time to spend
enough time with each plugin to figure out which configuration is
relevant to document.  :)

I am not sure which setting was used with the totem-mozilla package.
I suspect xine, but it might have been gstreamer.

> Even better if both alternatives was tested (either manually or by
> the script.

Note that the script do not care about the backend used.  It only
report the MIME types claimed to be supported by the plugins, and this
do not change depending on the backend (which is rather strange, as
the backends probably do not support the same set of format. :).

> If you want a static rule, then stating that "All recommends are
> fulfilled and no non-free or unofficial packages are used" weeds out
> the unofficial ffmpeg packages, but it is still ambiguous if xine or
> gstreamer is used as backend. You could state that "All recommends
> are fulfilled by the primary options..." but I believe that is
> difficult to verify, and might even be impossible in some cases.

Yeah.  The order of installation will affect this, and I do not know
what was installed in which order when doing the testing.  I just did
'aptitude remove oldplugin; aptitude install newplugin', or sometimes
'aptitude install plugin1 plugin2 plugin3 ...' (when extracting the
list of supported MIME types).

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen