On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, kangja wrote:
Thnaks for all the info provided. My worry about mplayer is that I have
come across warnings about its IPR infringement. Is that nothing to
worry about?
just out of curiosity, what kind of warnings about mplayer and ipr
infringements have you come across?
yes, there are some issues with some annoying proprietary codecs and
software patents (and there was that noncompliance with the GPL in
the past).
the debian project does not include mplayer because in the past they
believed it violated the licenses of some of its components (now believed
to be resolved??). they also cite patent concerns:
"software that can't be packaged"
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/unable-to-package
"mplayer reloaded"
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/03/msg00235.html
"re: mplayer / divx"
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/08/msg00071.html
mplayer's key goal is "play as many different media types as possible,
especially those that otherwise can only be played on Windows Media Player
or Apple Quicktime". to me this seems like a perfectly valid approach
until native decoders can be worked out.
i'm not looking for a xine vs. mplayer war, i like and use them both, but
xine doesn't have a third of mplayer's features and the
mozilla-mplayer (mplayer-plugin) is a great solution for media streaming
with your browser.
i don't know what the copyright and patent laws are in your country, but
in oppressive countries like the USA we have the mplayer disclaimer to
keep in mind:
"There is absolutely no warranty of any kind for these codec packages.
Copyrights of all DLLs remain with their respective owner(s). You should
be aware that some of these DLLs have licenses that restrict them to use
with certain programs. We only distribute them, the rest is your
responsibility."