On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Justin B Rye
<jbr@edlug.org.uk> wrote:
Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Dear Debian Multimedia Maintainers,
>
> I think that there are some typos and potential for improvements in the
> package description (1). (CCed l10n-english as it is a new package).
>
> Current state:
>
> Description: Internet television and radio player
> FreetuxTV is a video player based on LibVLC allowing you to watch and record
> TV on your PC. A large database (growing daily) of free WebTV/WebRadio/WebCam
> channels in more than 20 languages is accessible. You can also play streams
> from ISP television service if it provides this feature. Moreover, it is also
> possible to easily program your recording on each channel with differents
> transcoding formats.
> .
> The vlc package provides all multimedia codecs required by freetuxtv.
Yes, that's got a few non-nativisms.
I'm not a native (and propably not a very good) English speakers. So
I'm not able to help you very much about the language rules to follow
or not. So I trust you.
> I'm afraid the short description does not adhere to the Developer's reference,
> section 6.2.2 (no need for capitalization). And a program does not allow
> something.
There's no need for *extra* capitalisation just because of its status
as a short description, but "the Internet" is widely considered to be
a proper noun and therefore intrinsically capitalised. (To me this
makes about as much sense as capitalising "the sky", but it seems to
have become the standard rule.)
> Please consider my proposal for a new description.
>
> Description: internet television and radio player
> FreetuxTV is a video player based on LibVLC enabling you to watch and record
Maybe I'm showing my age, but to me "video player" means a device you
slot VHS cassettes into. Since you can apparently use this for radio
shows too I would suggest "media player" (but I won't try to eliminate
TV-centric terms in the rest of the description).
Upstream seem to call it "libVLC" (when non-sentence-initial).
I approve of stamping out useless uses of "allow", but I would suggest
just simplifying down to
FreetuxTV is a media player (based on libvlc) for watching and recording
television on a PC.
This phrasing also covers watching TV on a *friend's* PC (assuming the
copyright police haven't declared that illegal). We might even
consider using some term more general than "PC", but for now I haven't
bothered.
> TV on your PC. A (daily growing) large database of free WebTV/WebRadio/WebCam
"A large and growing database" ("daily" is a wild exaggeration).
> channels in more than 20 languages is accessible. You can also play streams
> from ISP television services if they provide this feature. Moreover, you can
"ISP television services" (and especially the "they" referring back to
the ISP) doesn't quite work. The previous sentence was about what's
accessible; we don't need to switch to second person when we can just
carry on in the same way. Maybe:
It gives access to a large and growing database of
free WebTV, WebRadio, and WebCam channels in more than 20 languages,
along with television services provided by ISPs to their subscribers.
(Deliberately ambiguous about whether the IPTV services are in the
database, since I don't know the answer.)
In fact, the database is just an online database (another and related project) of URL link that maybe downloaded in FreetuxTV.
> also easily record each channel with different encoding formats.
"Moreover" plus "also" seems redundant. More importantly, is it
saying that it can record them no matter whether they're in PAL or
NTSC, or is it saying that if you've got 1000 TV channels it can
easily arrange for each one to be recorded into a different format?
I genuinely can't tell, so for now I'm just going to leave that bit
out - we've already said it can record things.
> .
> The vlc package provides all multimedia codecs required by freetuxtv.
What's the point of telling me this when vlc is pulled in by a
"Depends:"? The fact that FreetuxTV can use any media format
supported by VLC is already implicit in the fact that it's "based on
libVLC", isn't it? But maybe instead of dropping this line we should
drop the earlier reference to libVLC, and do it like this:
Description: Internet television and radio player
FreetuxTV is a media player for watching and recording television on a PC. It
gives access to a large and growing database of free WebTV, WebRadio, and
WebCam channels in more than 20 languages, along with television services
provided by ISPs to their subscribers.
.
It relies on VLC for its multimedia codecs.
(WhyTheName footnote: I suspect it wouldn't have got this name if
there wasn't a French IPTV service called Freebox TV.)
For me the patch, seems ok, I will check it with my co-Debian package maintainer and integrate it with the next upstream version.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package