Subject: bug#44453: MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin is not installed

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2020 16:06:19 -0500

Leo Famulari <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 04, 2020 at 10:27:33PM +0100, musics--- via Bug reports for GNU Guix wrote:
>> To play a video with totem, I have this problem:
>>  
>> An error occurred
>> The playback of this movie requires a MPEG-4 AAC decoder plugin which is not installed.
>> 
>> What package should be installed?
>
> I'm not 100% sure, but I think you'd need the "bad" set of GStreamer
> plugins — the package is called gst-plugins-bad. Totem is based on
> GStreamer and gst-plugins-bad includes the faad2 AAC decoder.

gst-libav should also be sufficient.  Also, it *might* be necessary to
install 'gstreamer' to the same profile that 'gst-*' is installed in, to
ensure that the environment variables are automatically set as needed.

> Maybe we should add these plugins to our Totem package?

I think it's important that plugins with patent-encumbered codecs, or
codecs with code quality issues, should remain *optional*, and not be
installed automatically.  It should be possible to install a modern
desktop environment in Guix that does not include these codecs.

What do you think?

      Thanks,
        Mark