[...] > So far it's played everything I've tried to play on > it, including .wmv Windows Media player videos, Real > Player videos, QuickTime, .AVI, and all the codecs > seem to already be there too! It also played some > videos I had that were damaged or that I hadn't > finished downloading yet. > > Any chance we'll ever get VLC media player in the > official IPS package repository?
A distro that's sponsored by a company with enough bucks that they're a potential target for lawsuits, and is intended to be fully redistributable worldwide, is going to have problems incorporating any media player with non-free codecs. Software patents, not the implementation, are the problem. See http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html for example. MS and Apple can include very capable media players because they license the codecs (and own some themselves) and you pay for that as a (small) part of the cost of the OS. You could in principle use a player that uses gstreamer plugins (I don't think vlc does) and buy and use the Fluendo plugins (of which the mp3 plugin is free, and the rest aren't). The reports of getting that to work that I've seen are...mixed. I haven't had much luck on SPARC (with just the free mp3 plugin), but I haven't spent much time fooling with it, either. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
