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warzone2100: DFSG/GPL & videos



Hi ftpmasters & games team,

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy war game. It was a proprietary game
by Pumpkin Studios and Eidos Interactive. Later the source code and
graphics were GPLed and a free software project sprung up to restart the
development. Recentlyish Eidos released the campaign videos under the
GPL, which was of major importance for the campaign mode of the game: 

http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1818#p17202
http://download.gna.org/warzone/videos/

Unfortunately the proper "source code" for them (3D models, animation,
voice-over recordings and so on) is long lost and most likely does not
exist any more.

The videos were released in RPL format (ARMovie Video), which is an old
multimedia container format like Ogg. They are available from the
upstream video download page and unpack to about 1GB according to
upstream (the LZMA file is 476M).

Upstream then converted these files via AVI format to Ogg (re-encoded in
Vorbis & Theora) and packaged them up in a .wz file (ZIP file) for use
by the game. The result is 162MB and appears to be the same quality as
the originals. With the new Thusnelda Theora encoder and some luck this
could shrink further.

The upcoming 2.2 release of the game can make use of these videos and is
in beta at the moment. I'd like to have the videos uploaded to Debian
too to make the game experience better.

Would the ftpmasters require the 476MB sequences_rpl.tar.lzma to be
uploaded to Debian? Do we have to convert them to Ogg at package build
time or can we ship both the Ogg and RPL versions in the source package?

I suggest that the DFSG #2 could be satisfied by Debian including only
the 162MB Ogg files. The real "source code" doesn't exist, so the
preferred form for modification has to be the 1GB of RPL files. It isn't
clear to me that DFSG #2 requires those to be available from the Debian
archive and in this case I'd like to interpret it as "source code has to
be available from upstream", which it is.

The GPL might be more problematic, but I would suggest that we could use
3. b) to avoid distributing the 476M sequences_rpl.tar.lzma on all the
mirrors and just keep a copy on ftp-master or similar.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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