Re: This is the digital image era
Interesting discussion - thanks. I need to go back over it and read the history. In case it hasn't been said, my guess is the cautious distros are following Debian's lead, and Debian unfortunately won't package mplayer for fear of legal repercussions. There has been (very) heated debate though on the debian lists about this, with different members of the debian legal team taking opposing sides. This deadlock of lawyers is probably to blame. So every debian user on the planet either gets it from Marillat or compiles it.
One notes however that the Mplayer team don't seem to give a hang about distributing windows codecs or compiling libdvdcss into mplayer by default - in fact, one of them I think talked about the benefits of deliberate civil disobedience in this area on one list - and I think the only item the Videolan website seems to be cautious about is the a52 dts stuff or whatever it is.
Apropo of nothing I suppose
...
Libdvdcss is obviously a non-issue - not a single law suit anywhere in the world. You have to wonder if the DVD Forum are scared of having their patent challenged in the courts (which would almost certainly happen? EFF, OSF etc). As to the MS codecs I'm not qualified to say. However that's a good point about the mp3-lame issue: hopefully the corporations will sue each other to death over it and leave linux users alone!
gilpel@altern.org wrote: Le 25 Février 2007 12:48, Ronny Standtke a écrit :
> It is known that Klaus has strong views in favor of open standards
> and to the disadvantage of proprietary stuff. It's a valid
> position.
What's the OpenSource standard for video you'd like to propose? Xvid?
It's based on Mpeg, which is proprietary. In case there is none, do
you
really count on Linux users for refraining to watch video for the
years to come... until, in 10 years from now, with Linux's share of
the market having tremendously risen :) , it will be at last possible
possible to offer an OpenSource format *and make it accepted
worldwide as the the de facto standard* ? If so, stop doing hard
drugs!
For the time being, even big companies don't agree on who owns the
codecs. Alcatel-Lucent has sued Microsoft, AT&T Warns Apple of patent
infringement, etc. If Linux stays on the line watching this ridicule
show, it will soon be too late to jump on the bandwagon. The big
companies battling in court continue providing the formats. and, as I
said, AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent can't sue MPlayer before they get to
MS's and Apple's, which could take years, as the ownership of those
codecs could be traced back to the inventor of the 1+1=2 algorythm.
And MS and Apple won't sue MPlayer for
fear of making the stakes of
this stupid game all too clear.
> And by the way, OpenOffice import/export filters do not really fall
> into the category of multimedia codecs. The filters are (somewhat
> reverse engineered) pieces of "legal" open source software, not
> some binary-only Windows libraries.
As state televisions all over the world offer their multicasts in
proprietary formats, they could be sued by citizens for providing
their content in a form that obliges them to acquire software from a
given company, thereby giving it an undeserved competitive edge.
MPlayer won't be sued, and maintainers even less.
Anyways, we could discuss this for days on end, it won't change what
will happen. Some developers figured out the reasoning I expose here
long before me and they're climbing Distrowatch's chart. This trend
will continue.
P.s.: It seems this list is so dead that Klaus had to resort to
let
anybody post without registering. I'm reposting this with the address
I registered with, vainly hoping that it will make less spam to
manage for my provider.
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