[opensource-dev] Quicktime

[Cinder Roxley]

On April 21, 2016 at 9:39:31 AM, Henri Beauchamp (sldev at free.fr <mailto:sldev at free.fr> ) wrote:
 
On Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:18:37 +0000, Cinder Roxley wrote: 

>> Like I already wrote earlier, the way to go is to use the gstreamer SDK  
>> for Windows and get a gstreamer plugin compiled for the latter.  
> 
> With all due respect, gstreamer is a major pain to build on Windows 

It's a pain to build under Linux too :-D But CEF is even more painful 
to build, so... 

Plus that "pain" is to go through only once and for all, to build the 
pre-built package that will then be used to build all the viewers 
(painlessly). 
True.

> and runs afoul of dozens of patents and licenses. It’s fine if you’re 
> building from source for linux, but it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen for 
> commercial software if you want to play any “standard” media format like 
> h264 or mp3. 

Please, elaborate and give pointers. There are dozens (and probably closer 
to dozens of dozens) of Linux and *BSD distributions (i.e. binary, ready 
to run OS+software, commercial or not) providing and using gstreamer, and 
I never heard about any lawsuite related to this fact... 
These distributions either do not include the patented video formats or provide them in source form for building. This is addressed in gstreamer’s documentation:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/licensing.html (Licenses of applications using gstreamer)

> Something like libvlc might work if you want a cross platform library 
> (but again, there are per-install royalties to use h264 so you’d still 
> be screwed on mp4.) 

Software patents are a US thingy... I'm glad the UE rejected them. MP4, 
H264 and anything involving patented protocols and formats are free to 
play in the whole world, but in the US... *If* such patents prevent to 
provide a full set of CODECs, I guess LL would have to restrict their 
number in their pre-built library package (gstreamer is not monolithic, 
it is fully modular), but TPV developers outside the US won't have to 
bother with such restsictions... 
US and Australia, not to mention Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and any other country whose legal codes frown upon violation of software patents. Distributing a viewer that decodes the patented video compression puts the end user in legal jeopardy. (Albeit, there is slim to no chance of anyone being prosecuted for decoding h264 in a viewer, but we can’t condone breaking any country’s law on an official Second Life communications channel.)

> Platform-specific plugins could take advantage of the OS’s media playback 
> capabilities, without license and patent headaches. 

Perhaps for Windows. But again, Linux don't have any patent for playing 
media and no lawsuite whatsoever prevent Linux distros to be distributed 
(including in the US)... I'm still extremely doubtful about such patent 
issues for software that are only meant to *play* *existing* media files 
(i.e. media files you acquired legally and already paid any patent for). 
Linux distributions, for example Ubuntu, don’t ship with proprietary codecs, you must install them after the fact. (You can buy legitimate gstreamer plugins from the Canonical store.) Even if you build the gstreamer-plugins-ugly package from their repo, you’re greeted with a popup the first time you try and play a video with it in the US that what you’re doing may be illegal.

As far as patent infringement lawsuits, MPEG-LA, the patent holder, is one of the biggest patent trolls in the industry. Going even as far as billion dollar lawsuits against paid license holders like Microsoft.

MPEG LA sues Audiovox http://www.twice.com/article/257658-Audiovox_Disputes_MPEG_LA_Lawsuit.php

MPEG LA sues Alcatel Lucent http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100329006257/en/MPEG-LA-Lawsuit-Alcatel-Lucent-Settled

MPEG LA sues Apex https://www.allbusiness.com/legal/legal-services-litigation/5917877-1.html

MPEG LA has sued Google over V8 (for being too similar to h264, MPEG LA lost.)

-- 
Cinder Roxley
Sent with Airmail

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/attachments/20160421/19b695ce/attachment-0001.htm