If building an application for a school district I would build it based upon GStreamer.
GStreamer has plugins grouped as - good, bad, ugly good is gstreamer plugins that don't violate known patents bad and ugly do. But by going with gstreamer and including the gstreamer-good plugins, the school district can optionally license the fluendo plugins if they need to be able to play patented codecs w/o violating patents. On 10/16/2012 5:15 AM, LM wrote: > I was thinking of the situation from the point of view of if a school > system wanted to distribute applications or even an entire operating > system within their district, what are known legal issues to avoid. > I'm sure there are plenty of unknown issues that can't be taken into > account, but somewhere there should be a list of what to be aware of > with known problems in this area. > > Alice Wonder wrote: >> the only thing >> I could suggest is look at what Fedora distributes since they do attempt >> to avoid distributing patent infringing multimedia software. > > I definitely intend to do that. > > I thought that because some of the strictly GNU based distributions > were very careful about copyright issues, they might be a good source > of information as well. However, it looks like they mainly care about > copyright issues, not patent issues. (There seem to be quite a lot of > those to look out for too. > http://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines > ) I also looked at some of the Debian builds, but they don't appear > to be as strict as Red Hat. > > Matthew Burgess wrote: >> 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. > > I did run across an interesting estimate on when certain patents run > out at this site: > http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/ > Not sure how that correlates with software like smpeg which according > to various sources is supposed to be patent unencumbered and handle > MPEG-1: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPEG > > For audio, I usually prefer wave format compressed with flac. That > way, you have lossless compression. There are other options like > wavpack, but I haven't really tried them out. There are also several > comparison guides between lossless formats, such as this one: > http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison > I also use midi format a lot with abc2midi and timidity. Freepats has > some nice open licensed soundfonts. With those tools, you can produce > your own music from pd sheet music or your own compositions. > > I haven't had much of an opportunity to look into video, but I thought > Dirac Schroedinger ( http://diracvideo.org/ ) might be a useful option > as well. It was developed by the BBC. It would be really interesting > to see a comparison between Dirac Schroedinger and VP8. > > If anyone runs across other sources of information or multimedia > source tarballs that try to leave out possibly patent related code and > emphasize open codecs, please post. > > Thanks. > -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
