[Dalewyn]

I'm always annoyed how any Linux media player or encoder needs to bring its own entire media operating system, down to each individual nut and bolt.

On Windows there's Windows Media Foundation and DirectShow that centrally manage everything and also support the "individual nut and bolt" approach. Android has its own central thing (MediaCodec?) that must be used. MacOS and iOS presumably have their own central manager (Quicktime?) too.

But Linux? It doesn't serve as an operating system for media. It's tremendously inconvenient as an admin/user rather than an evangelist.

[shmerl]

You don't need to implement every nut and bolt in the application. Lot's of useful things can do the heavy lifting (Pipewire, ffmpeg, libplacebo, Mesa and so on). Linux isn't after calling it all using some uniform "DirectFoo" naming scheme, but tools are there.

Comparison is also invalid. Linux as a whole (not the kernel but OS experience) isn't controlled by some Big Brother who decides what and how it's done single mindedly. So such kind of composite result is somewhat expected.

[pjmlp]

Hence why it will never be embraced by desktop application developers, and Electron it is.

[shmerl]

Yeah, keep complaining about everything not being proprietary enough, while everyone who needs just makes it work (OBS, mpv, etc.).

[pjmlp]

Those 2% will appreciate their efforts.

[shmerl]

Those who use it appreciate their efforts. You aren't using it, why are you even complaining especially with complete nonsense comments. Anti Linux shilling should be getting old.

[pjmlp]

Unfortunely I still have to, from time to time.

Luckly Android, ChromeOS and WebOS as proper Linux distributions have replaced most of it.

[account42]

Considering how user hostile most app developers are, I don't miss them.

[account42]

Install ffmpeg and you have all the codec support you need. How is this a real problem?

Yeah, binary software will have to ship its own copy of ffmpeg... This isn't unique to media codecs though.

[arp242]

And when someone installs some obscure or outdated and vulnerable codec on these systems, it's then automatically exposed to all sorts of applications to exploit. Maybe Windows sandboxes that these days(?) It was definitely a problem in the past.

No perfect solutions here; both "system-wide codecs" and "every application brings their own codecs" have their own up- and downsides.

Besides, with ffmpeg and gstreamer the system-wide codecs paradigm also works on Linux.

This is one of those "it's different but it doesn't really matter much" type of things. Most people "just" install vlc or mpv or whatnot and things will "just work" for them, not really different from Windows. That it's technically slightly different is almost entirely transparent to the user.

[pjmlp]

Yeah on UNIX side, NeXTSTEP, Irix, Solaris had their own thing, as graphical workstation UNIXes, and were great.

Ideally that kind of thing would be part of GNOME, or KDE, but then there are those that rather keep using twm like experience, making GNU/Linux really only good for headless experiences, at least the UNIX/POSIX part is always there.