On 08/01/2012 02:18 PM, Titanus Eramius wrote:
In my case, I'd prefer using Debian-Multimedia anyway for my music/videos/what have you. Debian doesn't even give me libdvdcss because of "questionable" legal status. Since almost all DVD movies on the market since the dawn of time are content scrambled, this is a case of Debian-Multimedia > Debian for media enthusiasts.On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:20:59 +0300 Teemu Likonen<tlikonen@iki.fi> wrote:Gary Dale [2012-08-01 13:55:09 -0400] wrote:Agreed. I would also advise people to stay away from debian-multimedia. It's packages are incompatible with standard Debian packages in many cases. [...] debian-multimedia can be too much of a headache.It has worked fine the seven or eight years I've been using it. So, it depends. Different Debian releases and different packages vary so much that I think we can't say that Debian multimedia is good or bad as a whole. Instead we could warn users that occasionally there are incompatible packages.My 2 cents on this is, that once packages is installed from Debian Multimedia it's very hard to go back to stable. But if one keeps using Debian Multimedia there are rarely any problems. Cheers Most desktop end-users may find it more worthwhile to use Debian-Multimedia for multimedia due to a couple factors, anyway.
Sorry if that seems rather negative to Debian. I'm not the "obsessed with free-as-in-freedom" type. I use what works, and I don't lose sleep over libraries like libdvdcss or the w64codecs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to flame or diss Debian. But objectively there are definite downsides to an "all-free" lifestyle, and end users on OSen like Windows and OS X look at Debian and wonder why we would choose NOT to have DVD support (Remember, from their point of view, it's a bit of an all or nothing perspective. libdvdread and libdvdmenu are safe even by Debian standards, without CSS it's still "no DVD support.").
It's important to a lot of people, but it is often the attempts to make open source moral/ethical issues that scares a lot of would-be adopters of Linux away.
Just... food for thought.