Re: MPlayer revisited
On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 09:42:08AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Diego Biurrun <diego@biurrun.de> wrote:
>
> > I was told that it is now up to the FTP masters to review the package
> > and admit it into the distribution. I was also told that these people
> > are worried that MPlayer might infringe upon software patents. [...]
>
> ..might infringe upon patents that will cause problems for debian,
> in particular.
Yes, but as outlined below, it's not different from other multimedia
players wrt patents.
> I understand it was sort-of on hold because it was too late for
> the sarge freeze already. Maybe we can move on now and get it
> into etch.
That would be great. I'm here to assist this process. If I can help in any
way by answering questions or making changes to MPlayer, I intend to do so.
> > But at the same time MPlayer is not special in the sense that it is just
> > another multimedia player and very similar to VLC[4], xine[5], avifile[6],
> > ogle[7] or FFmpeg[8] and many others, all of which are already a part of
> > Debian. These players differ in their feature set somewhat, but MPlayer
> > does nothing that several of the others will not do as well. Thus there
> > is no reason to treat MPlayer differently, all players are affected
> > equally by patents.
>
> I'd be surprised if mplayer breaks any new patents for debian.
It does not.
> My summary of the issue is http://people.debian.org/~mjr/mplayer
Nice summary. One point is not fully correct, though:
2. DeCSS code: removed and mplayer-debian uses libdvdread3 instead
libdvdread is not a replacement for libdvdcss. Instead of using the builtin
libdvdcss the Debian package dynamically loads a libdvdcss that might be
present on the system in question.
Diego
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