I was on both mailing lists for a while (VLC, FFMpeg) and the latter admitted to changing the names but did have all the codecs available under Ubunut.

While the VLC people blame Ubuntu on their mailing lists, it turns out that the FFMpeg library uses different names for some codes in their newer version - and on the latest Ubunut (Intrepid), that version of VLC doesn't use the newer names. In fact, most of the time it signals that the writer has decided that she doesn't need to logically justify her statements and is a good idea to subject them to more scrutiny. PS: Saying end of story does not, contrary to popular belief, actually mean that it's the end of the story. ) so the application devs would write in whatever they want and computer users could run in whatever they want - because that's what computers are for: not doing 'computer stuff' but using computers to accomplish things. TL DR version: It would be a wonderful world if all the OSs have compatibility layers for all the APIs (JVM/JNI, Mono/CLR, GTK, QT, WIN32, Carbon, Cocoa. In fact, I'm quite happy that some kind soul has decided to hide as much of that as possible from me so I can focus on getting my actual work done. I write multi-platform OpenGL and OpenSSL code, when I call SSL_check_private_key(ssl_ptr) or gluNewQuadric(), I don't care what lower-level function is called.

You wouldn't say that QT creates a 'fake' QT environment for applications like KDE so why would you say that WINE provides a 'fake' WIN32 environment for DVDFab? The application doesn't care what's underneath the API that it sees, it only wants function calls to result in the documented behavior and is agnostic about the rest. There is no principled difference between running an application that's NIX-QT-KDE and one that's NIX-WIN32-DVDFab. KDE requires the QT APIs in the same fashion that DVDFab requires the WIN32 APIS. WINE is a set of libraries that provides a different API on which some other applications are built.

QT is a set of libraries that provides a certain API on which applications are built. You are comparing things on two different levels of abstraction here. QT doesn't need a whole bunch of wrappers and libraries to fake a windows environment, DVDFab does.

Dvdfab 11 strip warnings