Re: MP3 + Patent issues in Debian
On Monday 16 July 2007 10:01:25 Kumar Appaiah wrote:
> Dear Debian users,
>
> While talking about Debian in a LUG meet, someone pointed out that
> Debian's distributions could play MP3s out-of-the-box (Etch
> included). This is unlike the Fedora/Ubuntu policy of not making
> available the (supposedly) patent encumbred codecs (decoders, at
> least) by default, on the install CD.
>
> I tried to search for the Debian take on this issue (mailing list
> discussion or bug report), but couldn't find the definitive
> discussion. Could someone please point me to it?
Yes, Debian (Etch) can play mp3 files out of the box. This suprised me too
when I first installed it because Ubuntu will not. Since Ubuntu is based on
Debian, I thought for sure that I would have to hunt for the codecs.
Well, it turned out that it wasn't necessary with mp3 files, but it was true
with other media formats, so a trip to www.debian-multimedia.org was in
order.
Joe
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