Re: MPlayer DFSG compatibility status
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 09:56:26AM +0200, Gabucino wrote:
> - Sam Hocevar raised a concern about libavcodec. I do not intend to answer
> this, since xine was allowed into Debian with a full, included libavcodec.
Sorry, that doesn't work. If the library has problems, it has problems
regardless of whether it was previously allowed into the archive or not.
If problems are found, then they certainly must be fixed in any existing
packages, but the need to answer these questions does not go away simply
because of previous accidents.
Xine's copy of libavcodec appears to include MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 Layer 3
audio encoding. That may be moot if the code is never actually used, but
encoders are explicitly enabled by -DCONFIG_ENCODERS, so this may not be
the case. (It's probably a good idea to disable those anyway, though.)
The only decoding issue I've heard of affects the ASF container format, but
that'd be in libavformat, not libavcodec. (They tend to go together, but it
isn't used by xine.) Oops. Looks like Xine has ASF support elsewhere,
which is a problem. I don't have an X machine to test whether this is
really enabled in the package or disabled in some place I'm not noticing;
I'd appreciate it if someone would check this.
Of course, I don't know the details of any related patents (and don't
wish to); I'm only going from what I've heard: TMPGEnc had MPEG-2 issues,
MP3 encoding issues are well-known, and VirtualDub had ASF issues.
(These are all issues of patents that have been actively enforced, at
least in the past.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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