[Advocate Play Ogg] Tactics

[Gervase Markham]

I didn't realise this mailing list was for discussion rather than 
announcements. That being so, I thought I'd circulate an email I sent to 
Matt Lee when I first got emailed about this campaign. I'd be interested 
to know what people think.

Gerv

Hi Matt,

I'm a great supporter of encouraging people to play Ogg. I bought a 
portable music player that could play Ogg, and my entire music 
collection is encoded that way. But I think you've missed something 
important here.

People don't like changing media players (or any software, for that 
matter). And it's a fact that VLC is less capable than something like 
Windows Media Player, which many people use. It doesn't have the 
integration with portable devices, online stores and so on. If you want 
people to switch their media playing to VLC so they can play Ogg, you 
are facing a very stiff battle.

So consider this: RMS seems to think it's fine to license a library 
under e.g. a BSD licence rather than the GPL in order to get widespread 
adoption of a particular standard that it implements. It's a case of 
adapting your tactics in order to reach your goals.

If that's true, I would suggest you would do much better, for 
downloaders on Windows, to point them at the DirectShow codecs from 
http://www.xiph.org/dshow/. (Leaving aside the fact that that page is a 
UI disaster; you'd need your own download site.) That way, you achieve 
your goal of getting them to play Ogg without making them switch media 
player to something which is less featureful.

Installing the codecs automatically enables Ogg for everything which 
uses the media framework - browser plugins, any media players they have, 
whatever. No need to switch, change UIs, recreate playlists, etc. etc.

Yes, they would be still using proprietary software. But making an 
enormous effort to get people to switch from WMP to VLC while they are 
still running an entire proprietary operating system seems like 
straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. If your primary goal is to 
get people to play Ogg, make that your goal. If your primary goal is to 
get people to run a complete free software media player, make that your 
goal. But you can't have both as primary goals, because the best tactics 
in each case are different.

Also, from a UI point of view, compare:
http://www.playogg.org/
with
http://www.getfirefox.com/

Which front page is most likely to get you to download the software it's 
promoting?

Hope that's useful feedback :-)

Gerv