Well, Fedora 8 came out. One thing that was annoying is that if you use a pre-release and then want to continue to use the release when it comes out instead of continuing to track the development of the next version (which always breaks less then a week after the release, and that’s ok), then you have to manually modify your repository files and point them to the release. Compared to Ubuntu where the pre-release repositories are for a specific version and when you track that and the release comes, you don’t have to do anything – the repository files just continue to track the released version and in order to track the next development – then you have to do some work. Much better in my opinion.

Anyway, in the release the “codec buddy” feature of the GNOME movie player now works as advertised, that is when it encounters a missing codec it pulls up a list of plugins that you need and how much each costs. Its ok for MP3 support because Fluendo offers the plugin for free and the codec buddy installs it without a problem, but for anything else you have to go to the webshop. This is annoying in the fact that you have to leave your player and go to the browser and buy stuff (and I haven’t tested how that integrates with the codec buddy, maybe later), but its more annoying that I just want to play some movie that a friend sent me by email and now I get prompted to pay 7 Euro for this codec and 18 Euro for that codec. Also, if you get WMV files that use the ASF container (quite common), then the Movie Player can’t handle them and the codec buddy offers no plugins for them, and even the gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin that you can get from Livna doesn’t work with that. It works in Ubuntu so I don’t know what the problem is – I need to open a ticket about it.