Dealing with codecs, was: Making deals with Microsoft

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 15:59 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
> Hey Remco,
> 
> > I only have/had two problems with the situation, and that's not
> > something against Canonical per se
> 
> I do have some problems with this but it can not be solved by limiting
> the users workstation; I don't even believe it's right to keep certain
> formats off the CD for instance keeping liblame away from ubuntu is a
> great travesty since it's free software.
...snip...
> I'd favour having all codecs on board by default; for instance we
> should be trying to get real media to make a _real_ real media plugin
> and stop fobbing us off with their helix stuff, we should ask them for
> open source versions of the codec that works with everything. Not only
> that but any codec that we currently use windows dlls for we _must_
> reverse engineer and recode from scratch, work is already going into
> ffmpeg for wmv support. More money is needed to free these parts
> properly.
> 
The problem is not that we don't have open-source encoders/decoders for
these formats - ffmpeg is open-source, and has has been able to decode
most of the codecs provided by the windows dlls for some time.  The
problem is that the compression algorithms used by these codecs are
patented, and we don't have a license.  It's not possible to decode MP3s
without needing a license (which, IIRC, Frauenhoffer provides to all
end-users).  It's not possible to decode MPEG2 video without needing a
license.  It's not possible to decode wmv (or, technically, VC-1)
without needing a license.

It sucks, but that's software patents for you.
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