Comments on: Ubuntu Disapointment

By: Lettre Hebdomadaire Ubuntu numéro 94 du 1er au 7 juin 2008. « Lettre Hebdomadaire Ubuntu

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:41:55 +0000

[...] Ubuntu décevante – Christian Schaller dénonce l’incapacité des distributions GNU/Linux à distribuer leur contenu multimédia en format ogg. Le blog de Jono Bacon offrait récement des vidéos de MOTU Ubuntu, mais dans le seul format propriétaire flash. Pour une distribution que se drape si fièrement dans les couleurs de la liberté et de la communauté. [...]

By: Daniel Holbach

Daniel Holbach — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:54:49 +0000

We had plans for making the MOTU Videos available as .ogg files, it just took some more time to get it done (editing, access to videos.ubuntu.com, etc.):
http://videos.ubuntu.com/motuvideos/

The next ones are going to be released there too.

By: Tony Whitmore

Tony Whitmore — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:02:06 +0000

Youtube works with Gnash, so you can view the videos using only Free Software. If the videos were being offered for download rather than streaming then there would be more of a case to make, I think.

By: Thomas Vander Stichele

Thomas Vander Stichele — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:15:38 +0000

Ubuntu has always been about ease of use and community first, never freedom. I don’t see why you’re surprised that Ogg is not their format of choice.

By: jpl

jpl — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:40:52 +0000

Another example involving Jono is Lug Radio. Perfect opportunity to showcase how OGG sound files are better quality and smaller than similarly encoded MP3 files.

But the OGGs LR makes available are always (21 vs 18 megabytes for the last episode) *larger* than the MP3s. Why? They encode the OGGs at a higher bitrate. But Joe Schmoe on the street when faced with a 18MB MP3 download versus a 21MB OGG download will intuitively think that OGG sucks.

I emailed them about this over a year ago… no change.

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:35:25 +0000

You say the tools have gotten quite good, but I actually found this really difficult when I made a quick video to demonstrate Mandriva’s Windows Mobile synchronization support. I simply could not get mencoder to combine a Theora video and a FLAC audio track into a Theora / FLAC or Theora / Vorbis video in a Ogg or MKV container – however I tried to do it, something went wrong. It didn’t have any trouble doing it as Xvid video and MP3 audio in an AVI container, though, so unfortunately I had to go with that in the end.

I know this is vague and not useful as a bug report, but I thought it would be worth recording the experience even so.

By: HangLoose

HangLoose — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:04:42 +0000

“…in the colours of community and freedom…”

Speaks about Mono/Moonlight hun ?

By: Luis Villa

Luis Villa — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:47:26 +0000

For a distribution which likes to drape itself so loudly in the colours of community ~~and freedom~~ this is a huge letdown.

There, fixed that for you

By: Maik Merten

Maik Merten — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:32:35 +0000

Ubuntu comes with a browser plugin handling Ogg Theora files nicely by default. Ubuntu’s users won’t have to download the file before watching, so at least for “Ubuntu internal” videos just streaming Ogg will usually work.

Having Flash as an alternative version of course may still make sense from a “realworld”/”have a fallback” point of view.

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:16:41 +0000

Christian, I’m sorry, where in the world did you get the idea that Ubuntu is about freedom or anything close?

Ubuntu openly compromises freedom for so-called “ease of use”. As other commenters here rationalize, Ubuntu’s choice of format seeks to make it easy to get the content they publish for people who use propietary patent-ridden formats. And they stop there. It’s been like that from the beginning. Over and over again Ubuntu has promised to make it clear to the users that they are installing proprietary drivers yet every time I try the most recent release, I find that proprietary drivers are silently installed.