Comment 7 for bug 349607

I'm working right now so I'm not able to check at the moment, but I don't think that universe is initially enabled - only main and restricted. (I originally only looked in the System > Administration > Software Sources sense, and though I assumed this just parses the sources.list when started and is thus the same, I suppose it is entirely possible that at some point they are not properly synced.) I'll check to make sure later on today.

When changes are made within Software Sources, it certainly does update the sources.list. When selecting "All Open Source applications" in Add/Remove Applications, the "Enable the installation of community maintained software?" dialogue appears only if Universe is disabled in sources.list. Upon selecting "Enable", the change is propagated to sources.list.

As I said, whether the codecs are found is dependant on whether Universe is activated in sources.list, which, it seems to me, should not be the case. Is this an incorrect assumption?