Chad Files

Call me a heretic if you want, but I require proprietary codecs. For my personal use I go with open codecs such as ogg and flac. However I make videos that must work on the widest range of operating systems and for that I use the AAC audio codec. The problem with AAC is that it is not open source and therefore not included in most Linux distributions. This issue has been discussed for years inside of the Linux community with both sides making good points but I for one am tired of it.

I upgraded my laptop earlier this week to use the latest greatest version of Ubuntu (7.10 Gusty Gibbon). I dread these upgrades because I usually spend several days getting things back the way they were because of the proprietary codes and drivers. I thought this time might be different, but I was wrong. I made it a whole 3 days before I realized that my old codecs had been removed with package upgrades. So I have spent the last hour and a half recompiling ffmpeg to give me ACC support back.

The silly thing about all of this is a simple solution exists; provide two versions of the distribution. One can be clean, only open source, the other can have all of the closed stuff. Now I am not advocating tossing the propitiatory licenses, quite the opposite actually. I say make the version with the closed code cost something and license the software. I would gladly pay $50 for a version of Ubuntu that came with legal out-of-the-box support for AAC, MP3 and so on. I know there are distros out there that do just this but they are not Ubuntu. I have ran every man stream version of Linux and in the past few years I have always come back to Ubuntu, I like it and it works great. So please Canonical (Ubuntu’s creator) add support for proprietary codecs, I will pay you, I promise.

Lately I have been looking at USB based Linux distributions; Why you ask? Because I wanted to have a thumb drive with a customized version of Linux in case I ever needed one. Then I was thinking when exactly would I use it — the answer is never. When I was in college the story was different. However, USB drives were brand new back then and real-time Linux did not exist.

All of this made me think, it would be amazing if public computers would just boot into whatever OS you wanted. It would not be too hard. Using something like Grub or Lilo a graphic could be presented to the user that asks Windows, Linux or OSX. The user could select what they wanted and off they go. When they are finished with the session they simply kill/exit the session and the machine would reboot and freeze on the boot loader’s “Select an OS” screen. For that matter the system could even load an image into memory when it boots, cleaning off all of the things that the last user changed. This concept takes the idea of a custom USB OS and simplifies it for people that do not understand all of the complexities of creating and using one.

Furthermore, why not allow the user to make a settings file and save it to a USB disk. Then the user could plug in the key and all of their settings would be ready to go, no matter what OS. Of course there are hundreds of hurdles to jump before a system like this could be functional, but wouldn’t it be nice.