On 10/16/2012 2:21 PM, Alice Wonder wrote: > If building an application for a school district I would build it based > upon GStreamer. > > GStreamer has plugins grouped as - > > good, bad, ugly
ugly has patent issues, bad I'm not as sure about. http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/modules/gst-plugins-good.html http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/modules/gst-plugins-bad.html http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/modules/gst-plugins-ugly.html > > 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
