From The Linux Foundation

"At Fluendo, the company I work for we try to solve the business issues surrounding the use of multimedia on Linux by licensing and developing codec plugins for GStreamer to ensure corporations that they have a legally vetted solution available."

I thing that there are serious holes in the codec plugin support provided for GStreamer. While Fluendo did a great work on providing decoder plugins for patent encumbered media formats, there are still no plugins to provide legal ways of ENCODING into widely accepted audio and video streams.

Although I accept the viewpoint that patent-free codecs are the true solution for the future of media, the current market adoption of patented formats generates a giant gap between ideas and economics.

For example, I know no legal way to encode MP3 files on Linux. People can do that technically with GStreamer ugly/bad/FFMpeg, but this is not a viable solution for companies which need patent licences to stay safe. If we want thousands of Linux based radio and television stations in the world, we need to have such encoding plugins companies can rely on.

With the ease of GStreamer, we can hope that such companies will to provide content in patent-free formats also. But we need the companies first, and the companies currently need formats that are "out there" in portable players and mobile phones and so on...