I have reluctantly decided that I’m going tu run Windows on my notebook. Don’t get me wrong here, I still love Linux, but I want my computer to do the things which I enjoy (with a minimum of effort).
One of the things I really like to do with my computer is watch movie trailers a Apple’s trailer site and h.264 video for linux is somewhat problematic. “Out of the box” the most popular Linux distros don’t support Quicktime video or Windows Media Video. It takes some work on the part of the user to get these formats to display correctly. I know already that somebody out there is going to complain about this observation, but I’d rather spend my time on another Open Source project, than on my every day operating system.
I’d love to see more unity in the Linux development community, especially in the area of media playback. Some distros have chosen to include proprietarty codecs while others have not; some have chosen one media framework while others implimented another. I personally prefer Gnome so it should come as no surprose that Gstreamer is my media framework of choice. The real problem is that when good codecs exist they aren’t free. When free codecs exist they aren’t good. I can’t justify an otherwise stable OS installation getting all twitchy because there was embedded video on a web page. Similarly, I have a hard time paying for software for a free operating system when I have already paid for plenty of applications for a commercial operating system.
None of that really matters right now as I’ve reinstalled WIndows XP on my notebook. All of my favorite media formats are available to me with no undue effort. That’s what i do. That’s what I enjoy. I hope the Linux world will spend some time in this area so I can “close windows”.