WDef
Group: Members
Posts: 798
Joined: Sep. 2005 |
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Posted: Aug. 14 2008,21:55 |
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Interesting idea.
One thing to consider would be what support for which codecs would be included.
The MPlayer project takes an activist perspective on patents and IP - namely, they openly disregard these because they are ideologically opposed to the restrictions these attempt to impose. Xine and VLC take similar standpoints, and have got away with it so far. More power to them I say.
Not all linux distros are prepared to take that chance however. Debian will not distribute these programs because their legal team cannot agree on the risk profile, though it is probably quite low if M$ codecs are not included. However iirc lame support for encoding, libdvdcss decode, dts decode, faac and some others are controversial and in theory might incur license fees.
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