On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 09:42:08AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > Diego Biurrun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I was told that it is now up to the FTP masters to review the package > > and admit it into the distribution. I was also told that these people > > are worried that MPlayer might infringe upon software patents. [...] > > ..might infringe upon patents that will cause problems for debian, > in particular.
Yes, but as outlined below, it's not different from other multimedia players wrt patents. > I understand it was sort-of on hold because it was too late for > the sarge freeze already. Maybe we can move on now and get it > into etch. That would be great. I'm here to assist this process. If I can help in any way by answering questions or making changes to MPlayer, I intend to do so. > > But at the same time MPlayer is not special in the sense that it is just > > another multimedia player and very similar to VLC[4], xine[5], avifile[6], > > ogle[7] or FFmpeg[8] and many others, all of which are already a part of > > Debian. These players differ in their feature set somewhat, but MPlayer > > does nothing that several of the others will not do as well. Thus there > > is no reason to treat MPlayer differently, all players are affected > > equally by patents. > > I'd be surprised if mplayer breaks any new patents for debian. It does not. > My summary of the issue is http://people.debian.org/~mjr/mplayer Nice summary. One point is not fully correct, though: 2. DeCSS code: removed and mplayer-debian uses libdvdread3 instead libdvdread is not a replacement for libdvdcss. Instead of using the builtin libdvdcss the Debian package dynamically loads a libdvdcss that might be present on the system in question. Diego -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
