I said nothing about France nor Free, I say VLC is overrated and what is needed is either improvement of Nokia's proprietary media player to include more formats or a good open source media player UI which supports current libraries and abstraction layers.

For MKV all you need in GStreamer is libgstmatroska.so.

Capturing of streams is nothing special. I did that with MPlayer in 2003 although I had to compile it myself to get RTSP support. I've also done capturing on over DVB-S on cheap PPC Linux DVR in what was it 2001 or something. On Linux this is really nothing special.

Either these French Free STBs use a proprietary protocol and suck, or they use an open one and therefore its easy to write your own script or backend. In any case the support for such should be done via a library, or a config file.

What sucks on GNOME is that there is no support for scanning (and more, like EPG) using DVB-? so before you got your channels you need to use a CLI utility (or Kaffeine). Fortunately, DVBDaemon is being developed for GNOME, and it has a Totem backend. This is the right way: writing a backend for the specific media player. For example, another media player like VideoLAN Client, MPlayer, Exaile, or whatever could then also support these features easily.

GStreamer is also not a GNOME application, and neither is PulseAudio, nor is DBus. See, you want everything modular and use abstraction layers. Doing so, the end result is that each UI only has its own GUI backend (CLI, Ncurses, GTK, Qt, Cocoa, Win32, ...). This means maximum code reusage for your other media player (or any program for that matter) uses the same libraries. Imagine every application shipping its own libc or its own mp3 library. Or all compiled static. Utter madness! And very much the same thing as going on here, except that its hypothetic one.

So instead of yet another bloated media player, or yet another media player with a **** UI not optimized for N900/Fremantle, its far more useful to use available libraries and get these supported in a media player which _does_ have a UI optimized for N900/Fremantle.

And if you think 2844798142191451 choice is good go spend a day on Walmart without knowing wtf you need. Cause that is how a newbie experiences choice; overwhelming. It is a common complaint about the tons of Linux distributions available, and it is partly valid (each does have +/-, and many are specialized in something, but there is also a lot of overlapping and double work.).

This lowers the signal-to-noise ratio, and makes it harder to find projects which actually _matter_. Imagine one unique project in Multimedia subcategory. The more other projects in this subcategory, the less chance it has to be spotted.

The very complaint we also hear about iPhoneOS with their 4959501 fart apps and other nonsense (while there is for example no erotic content to be found, and for example no alternative rendering engine like Gecko).

So, no, it isn't a good thing to get RealPlayer, Helix Player, VLC, MPlayer, Totem, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Exaile, Songbird, Xine, XMMS2, and all the other stuff in Multimedia subcategory. The only interesting stuff from this list is libraries from RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime. Those we want in /usr/lib, and we want them native, debianized, and legal. Then our media player can play such files. Which... is what Fluendo and/or Nokia did because some of these codecs got ported to Maemo 5 (with patent license paid).