Slashdot Mirror

Over the last few years a lot of companies have sprang up using ffmpeg as a backend while shoving some putrid gui over the top which somehow justifies the pricetag (in this case "Video Encoder Engine for Adobe Flash" costs $600!).

They tend to fall into two camps, those who attempt to use the lgpl parts of ffmpeg and publish the license; and those who outright ignore the gpl or pretend they've followed it.
ffmpeg keeps a "Hall of shame" for these violaters but sothinkmedia have not yet been added.

I downloaded their videoconverter and ran it through wine. It gave me a eula with some non-gpl/lgpl terms which I duly said yes to "You may not make or distribute copies of the Software, or electronically transfer the Software from one computer to another or over a network. You may not recompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the Software to a human-perceivable form".

Program installed what's this, avcodec.dll oh dear. Compiled in with x264, xvid etc. so GPL rather than LGPL. For a token gesture it created a folder called xvid with the GPL placed in there even though they violate most of it.

Stealing code from flashgot is a minor issue compared to that of ffmpeg.

Well here is the discussion about chrome, one thread, 2 links as it crossed a month boundary.
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2009-May/070533.html
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2009-June/070607.html
Also here is where they keep track of violators, http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html

Exactly.

It should be realized that the party who would enforce any such breach of copyright would be the people who hold copyright: its writers, whereby any suit on a breach of that clause would have to argue that there exist valid, applicable patents that apply to the capabilities GPL licenced code,. a stance copyright holders have not taken. [1]

http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html

So, what you're telling us is that although all of us in the States have been using FFMpeg illegally without a license for years, when someone finally decides to try and be legal and purchase a license, now they are still in the wrong? Sounds like the FFMpeg people need to start dual-licensing or something

Exactly. Unfortunately, they'll probably just say "we don't care about patents" which doesn't help anyone.

Of course, I'm still missing the biggest point here - since when do they need FFMpeg for HTML 5 support? It doesn't require any patented codecs, and they could always use DirectShow filters.

In reality Theora isn't that great and Google probably wants to save bandwidth, so they support H.264. Since XP/Vista includes no H.264 decoder, Google has to ship their own.

Most free/OSS media players (including vlc and mplayer) just use libavcodec (ffmpeg) as the backend.

Here's the list of projects using ffmpeg. Differences in playback are probably due to hardware or the particular options selected in a given media player and the output driver (Xv, SDL, OpenGL, DirectX, etc.).

hall of shame

> Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone would find GPLed code in Windows? Full source disclosure, and the right to copy without cost.

That's just complete bullsh*t. Really, try to understand how things work. Exactly the same things happen as if they had copied the code
from some commercial app - they may end up paying damages. The GPL just means they _had_ an _additional_ option, namely to publish the code.
With GPL v2 they actually do _not_ have that option anymore _after_ infringing, they _must_ negotiate for reinstantiation if they
want to use the code that way.
One "disadvantage" is that Open Source projects are more likely to go the "make a public relations disaster" instead of suing for damages,
look here for how "horrible" the results usually are: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html (and those certainly can't be "accidential").
Btw, the Windows code is "available" as well, so someone might copy-and-paste that, too. Not to mention
all the code in various forums.

(I guess it is ironic that RealVideo format is probably heavily protected by patents.)

The file in question contains RV40 video and ATRAC3 audio. ATRAC was invented by our friends at Sony, and I don't know what claims they make on it. The ffmpeg project recently published an open-source decoder for ATRAC3, and Sony doesn't apper to be harassing anyone over it. RV40 is who-knows-what as it hasn't yet been reverse engineered. It's suspected to be based on H.264. The patent status of H.264 is unclear, although a federal court recently threw out some patents held by Broadcom.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu and http://www.ffmpeg.org are both 'shut down'. but they still link to thier old homepage.