Re: liba52 and libmpeg2 package naming
* Christian Marillat <marillat.christian@wanadoo.fr> [20011019 15:50]:
> >> "DIL" == David I Lehn <dlehn@vt.edu> writes:
> > I packaged liba52 and libmpeg2 a while ago. They've been sitting at
> > http://gstreamer.net/releases/debian/ (along with gstreamer debs too).
> > I'm still in limbo in the new maintainer queue and figure I should ITP
> > this stuff, update it, and get it in the archives.
>
> liba52 is an ac3 encoder ?
>
> If yes, can you read:
>
> http://www.netbsd.org/Letters/20010803-dolby.html
>
Yeah, seen it. Aaron and walken, the original authors of ac3dec, have
never been contacted about this. I beleive Aaron had initally informed
Dolby of his intention to write ac3dec and never received a reply.
Maybe this all doesn't matter legally, IANAL etc. The project now uses
the term "a52" or A/52 because it implements the ATSC A/52 standard and
Dolby's errata to that document. Perhaps it was also renamed to avoid
some trademark issues but I'm not sure.
So does this mean the library is not suitable for Debian? Other
projects use liba52 code, libac3 code (old version), or other
implementations of the specs: xine, mplayer, xmps, videolan, avifile,
and probably many more. Many of these are already in Debian archives.
I haven't checked but I assume they are complete upstream code bases,
ac3 decoding source and all.
So do I need to talk to -legal? Or has this issue already been resolved
with these other packages?
The standards doc and errata used for implementation are available at:
http://www.atsc.org/standards/a_52.pdf
http://www.dolby.com/tech/ATSC_err.pdf
-dave
--
David I. Lehn <dlehn@vt.edu> | http://www.lehn.org/~dlehn/
Computer Engineering Graduate @ Virginia Tech in sunny Blacksburg, VA
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