Re: Debian and Patents

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2010-08-31 09:42 +0200, Praveen A wrote:

> 2010/8/31 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss@iguanasuicide.net>:
>> I thought the patent encumbered software was banned from the repos due to
>> legal risk to SPI.  I get my ffmpeg and mp3 stuff from the debian-multimedia
>> repositories which, while good, are not official.
>
> apt-cache policy libmad0 ffmpeg
> apt-cache show libmad0 ffmpeg
>
> pravi@savannah:~$ apt-cache policy libmad0 ffmpeg
> libmad0:
>   Installed: 0.15.1b-5
>   Candidate: 0.15.1b-5
>   Version table:
>  *** 0.15.1b-5 0
>         500 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main Packages
>         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
> ffmpeg:
>   Installed: (none)
>   Candidate: 4:0.5.2-3
>   Version table:
>      4:0.6-2 0
>         101 http://ftp.de.debian.org experimental/main Packages
>      4:0.5.2-3 0
>         500 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main Packages
>
> It is in debian main. I was surprised to see even wmv/wma playing out
> of the box with squeeze.

AFAIK Debian's ffmpeg package does not disable any decoders, only
encoders are stripped.  So playing wmv/mp3/whatever works out of the
box, but to create your own mp3 files you need an uncrippled third-party
ffmpeg version.

Sven