bits from the DPL: June 2012

[Fabian Greffrath]

Hi Stefano,

Am 04.07.2012 17:06, schrieb Stefano Zacchiroli:
> On the other hand, what I wonder is whether we really need to get to
> that level of detail in the release note. Communication wise, it doesn't
> seem particularly appealing to me. How about mentioning the use cases
> (e.g. encoding/decoding music for common portable music players,
> encoding video for $kind_of_hardware, etc. --- I don't know what the use
> cases actually are, but you surely know better on that front)? I think
> that could be more appealing for release notes readers.

I see your point, the paragraph is indeed very technical and detailed. 
But it was my intention to use all these "buzz words".

All the use cases were already addressed before. You could rip your 
CDs in Debian (to e.g. Vorbis or FLAC) and convert the audio files 
into a format suitable for your media player (really? maybe only MP2 
then). But now we have lame and we have MP3, that makes a big difference.

Similarly, you could get video data from your DVDs and store the 
movies in e.g. Theora or Dirac format. But now we have x264 and 
xvidcore, which again makes a difference.

We did have vlc and mencoder before. But now they are fully 
feature-enabled.

Do a search for "debian mencoder" in google. Everybody and his dog 
seem to believe that we either do not have this package in Debian or 
that it's crippled and recommends installing it from d-m.o.

That's why I ecplicitely mentioned these packages and codecs in the 
paragraph.

Bye,
  - Fabian