Re: GStreamer xwidget

[Arthur Miller]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> This whole thread is very puzzling.
>
> On 27.11.2021 07:09, Richard Stallman wrote:
>>    > > We would have to trust them to place only free plugins in
>>    > > `gst-plugins-good' and `gst-plugins-base', and to document the plugins
>>    > > correctly.
>>    > Wait, it’s not needed to trust anyone.  There aren’t millions of 
>> plugins,
>>    > maximum hundreds: it would be perfectly feasible to include the list of
>>    > all of them into emacs.  The question is whether to*delegate*  that work
>>    > to GNOME, and the issue would then be when that list changes, what about
>>    > updates, etc.
>> Please state concretely what it is that you're disagreeing about.
>> Instead of arguing about whether to "trust GNOME", please tell
>> us what exactly the GStreamer developers did.  Then we can  see
>> whether that solves the problem.
>
> Whatever plugins are available on the user's system, are a result of the 
> distro
> including them (which, by default, means only the "good" ones get in), as well
> as the ones the user installed explicitly. Possibly "bad" too (the less
> well-written ones).

That, but, it still does not mean that proprietary codecs will not be present on
the OS even if a distro does not include them, even on a libre system.

A user can always install proprietary plugin(s), so it realy is up to user
consciusness.

If I remember well, people could just copy prorietary codecs from their Windows
systems and install them in gnu/linux to enable them in gstreamer, so there is
no guarantee that gstreamer won't play those.

I would really like to see gstreamer in Emacs, but I am not sure you can truly
prevent gstreamer from loading proprietary codecs.

https://lwn.net/Articles/217583/

Gstreamer seems to support those in order to support users who legaly purchase
licenses to proprietary formats, so getting this off gstreamer means probably
patching gstreamer and distributing own binary with Emacs. Prohibition should
maybe not be a goal?

> If you were designing the 'shell-command' command in Emacs today, would you
> start with a whitelist of all known free software programs and refuse to call
> anything not from that list?

Indeed. And how much are proprietary codecs different from linking Emacs to all
the system libraries in "unjust" systems, i.e. Windows and MacOS?

I think benefits of Emacs being able to play media outweigh the cons. In the
very end, if someone is bying DRM protected media, well, it is his/her personal
choice. In all these years with computing and DRM I have yet not purchased a
single DRM protected piece of software, beside few games back in time when they
used to come in paperboxes on CDs. I agree DRM is crap, but I also think it is a
personal choice people should make on their own.