On Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:29:48 -0400, LM <[email protected]> wrote: > Are there any good resources with information on how to build > multimedia applications without libraries and plug-ins that may be > most liable to patent issues.
My recommendation would be to ignore the software patent issue altogether :-) Especially when it concerns multimedia, compatibility is more important (to me) than abiding by the letter of the law. I recently spent some time converting some DVDs to Webm (VP8/Vorbis) videos, only to find out that my PS3 doesn't understand what they are, and being a non-opensource product I can't do jack about it. As such, I've had to re-encode them using H264 & MP3 in an AVI container :-( So, if you know what format all of your multimedia sources are going to be in, then that's great; just use the minimum number of plugins possible that gets you that support. If not, then it's probably best to try and enable as many plugins as possible to get as wide support as possible. Personally, if I wasn't PS3-encumbered, I'd only have my multimedia apps able to encode & decode webm. That just requires libvpx and libvorbis, and possibly matroska. I'd definitely want to avoid .wmv and .aac support as I'd imagine, given their origins, they would be the most likely to sic the lawyers on somebody. The Fraunhofer institute have a number of patents on the .mp3 format too, so I'd avoid that if possible. I seem to remember them mainly targeting encoders though, rather than decoders. That might be another pragmatic approach to take; build your multimedia apps with support for as many formats as possible so that you can decode anything that you may stumble across. When producing your own media, though, just use a combination of VP8 for video & Ogg Vorbis for audio. Hope this helps, Matt. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
