I find it useful to reaffirm my core goal in this whole multimedia hacking adventure. I started out with this goal back in 2000 and it has not changed:

I want one multimedia player that:

• can play any multimedia format I throw at it
• is simple to install and use (simple and consistent graphical user interface)
• runs under Linux
• is free
• is open source

Whenever I evaluate the state of multimedia support on Linux, I use the metric described above. Is it a difficult goal? Certainly. Is it possible? Absolutely. There are problems, but none could be described as insurmountable.