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This is a little bit tricky because it is, in theory, a violation of the DMCA to play DVDs without a properly licensed DVD player program. (Specifically, a program that has licensed the dread secret of CSS.)

Both Ubuntu and Mint have packages you can install to play DVDs.

If you don't mind paying some money, you can get a properly licensed DVD player from Fluendo. I bought this, and it Just Works.

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/oneplay-dvd-player/

I wish Fluendo would also offer a Blu-Ray player, but as far as I know the only legal-in-the-USA way to play Blu-Ray on Linux would be to install Windows in VirtualBox or some other VM, and then install a Windows Blu-Ray player.

- Some patent law, might require acquiring codecs from elsewhere (no mp3 nor h264 are available wherever software patent apply).

Fluendo has licensed the MP3 codec for individual use and you can download and use it free of cost. It's often a package in various distros.

- Some import/export law might require acquiring encryption from elsewhere (do still the USA consider large bits key encryption as "munition" and ban its export ?)

Sort of. For the most part, developers in the US wishing to export cryptographic software need to notify the government but no review of the code is required. In essence, the government gave up on regulating nearly all crypto available to the general public, with the exception of exports to certain restricted countries like North Korea, Iran, etc. Export of certain things, like militarized crypto equipment, is more strongly regulated. The wiki has a good article on the subject.

Yes, apparently, try http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-dvd-player/

They also sell licensed codec packs for gstreamer.

Unfortunately, this just pushes the problem onto Linux as a whole: "We notice you have an unsupported OS. Please use Mac OS or Windows to legally view this content."

Fluendo sells properly licensed codecs for Linux, including H.264. I doubt they'd care about your OS so long as they get the fees one way or another.

H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.

Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.

No hardware support you say? Hardware rendering of WebM in soon to be shipped hardware was shown at CES:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html

I know of no linux that has x264 out of the box. In many countries, it's illegal to use x264 without paying licensing fees, as all encoders and decoders require licenses. Today there are 3 legal ways to play H.264 on Ubuntu in the USA: the Flash player, and http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/ and Google Chrome.

Freedom is freedom for innovation. You want to build a new video software application or hardware device with H.264? Time to pay the piper. And the piper doesn't sell 10 packs of licenses.

You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.

With most video cameras that support H.264, you're breaking the law if you use them for commercial purposes. http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA

We need a free format for video to be widely supported. What would have happened to the web if you had to buy a patent license to create commercial content, servers, or browsers? It would have a few thousand users probably.

Innovation matters. Don't burden the future with what might make sense today.

Sorry, I didn't spot the DVD part.

If you want to play DVDs and you live in the US, you have to be aware that libdvdcss goes against the DMCA, and hence it's illegal (both on Windows XP or Ubuntu).

You should buy a licensed player like the Fluendo Dvd Player which comes in a .deb package ready to be installed with a double click.

In a perfect world, where users could unbundle and pay ala carte for commercial vs. free codecs, they would not buy them (they're not worth much vs. what we can do for free)

Actually, you can make that choice - to pay or not to pay for H.264 and other non-free codecs on Linux - today.

Each page shows about 10 to 20 patent numbers, or around 700 by a quick calculation.

That is unfortunately the reality, there's a forest of patents. And Theora claims to have found a landing spot with not a single tree, not a twig. Despite that Xiph surely has good intentions, the state of software patents makes that hard to believe. I don't know what Steve Jobs has heard, but I can understand him being a skeptic too. Maybe he is given FUD by the current patent holders of H.264 as they have a vested self-interest in keeping Apple on that format, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a core of truth to it.

Remember that Apple is shipping a lot of hardware, imagine the iPod/iPhone/iPad getting hit with patent lawsuits or ugly licencing demands. They can't just rebound like the open source community tp write out the infringing parts, they're pretty much stuck to continue selling content and shipping decoders in the now patented format. H.264 has all the usual suspects on board in the patent pool and it seems unlikely there will be any big surprises. Finally, a lot of people will not consider a PC that can't do H.264 decoding a fully functional PC anyway, Theora or not. BluRays come in H.264, my new video camera records in H.264 so you're not getting rid of any codec, you are just adding more. You can fight this long and very uphill battle, but the end result is that I'd still want H.264.

Microsoft and Apple already licence H.264, normal Linux users don't care about software patents anyway and if you're a corporate user you can get it legally from Fluendo. Mozilla is trying very hard to ignore that pretty much everyone have a H.264 decoder already or could get one by downloading flash. Personally I'd much rather see an embedded mplayer so all my videos play the same than some hackjob integration into my browser. Isn't it the *nix/OSS way to do one thing and do it well? Mozilla is the one desperately trying to forget those roots.

Last I checked, it was not illegal to purchase a properly licensed GStreamer H.264 codec, and use that. The cheapest bundle including H.264 from Fluendo would cost you 28 euro.

Then it would be illegal to redistribute that operating system. Game over, end of story, thank you for playing the Open Source game but you lost.

Last I checked, it was not illegal to purchase a properly licensed GStreamer H.264 codec, and use that. The cheapest bundle including H.264 from Fluendo would cost you 28 euro.

Assuming you are talking about the MP3 plugin it is free (as in beer) and the source code is available under the MIT license, which is GPL compatible. A similar approach could be used for H.264 and AAC decoders in Mozilla and Opera.

Open source implementations, for instance using the GPL, of H.264 and other codecs aren't illegal or disallowed as many people seem to think. In fact they are readily available and used by different companies who pay the licensing fees (if applicable). For instance Google distributes the FFMpeg H.264 decoder (GPL) with Chrome and has recently started using x264 (GPL) for their video encoding on Youtube. AFAIK they pay licensing fees for Chrome, but not for their Youtube use since the don't use more than 100.000 encoders.

It's possible to play all of those things perfectly legally on Ubuntu. I suppose MP3 is the one most people will need. Luckily, a nice company called Fluendo have partnered with Ubuntu to provide free and legal MP3 decoders for all Ubuntu users. It's been a while since I did a fresh install but I believe Ubuntu offers to install these automatically when you first try to play an MP3 with RhythmBox or Totem.

DVD and WMA are more complicated and, yuck, who uses WMA anyway? But, again, Fluendo offer a fully licensed DVD Player for Linux for a pretty reasonable €20. They also offer fully licensed codecs for other formats like WMA, etc.

And all of this will soon be a moot point as some of the MP3 patents have expired already and the remaining ones should be expiring pretty much everywhere in the next couple of years.

The Gnome HIG says:

Label all buttons with imperative verbs, using header capitalization. For example, Save, Sort or Update Now.

You're right that no dialog box should ever go "Are you sure? [No] [Yes]" and that's been true in GNOME since 2.0 came out seven years ago. Maybe you're not using GNOME apps?

Fluendo offers paid codec support. Of course, you have to pay. Fluendo is integrated in Ubuntu and you are prompted to purchase the Fluendo codecs when you run into a file with an unsupported codec.

There is a company dedicated to letting you pay for your codecs on Linux, although they do then bundle free player software. I am guessing more than one person has paid up :-)

In just a short time HP took what the open source clowns had been working so hard on and getting nowhere in the market and created a polished and commercial quality UI for their hardware.

You're an idiot. The UI wasn't created by HP. It was created by the very same "open source clowns" you are deriding.

www.fluendo.com

I heard that they just used Elisa Media center....

http://elisa.fluendo.com/

MAJOR work has been done in OpenSolaris 2008.11 (now available) to support a wider array of hardware since even the 2008.05 release. There's a good chance your wireless device will now be supported on OpenSolaris out-of-the-box, as they say.

Due to licensing restrictions, of which most people forget MP3 is proprietary, you need to get a license to download the MP3 GStreamer plugin on OpenSolaris. The license is free from Fluendo's website, but requires registration. Registration, downloading, and installation takes just a few minutes and is completely legitimate.

IMHO, there are many compelling reasons to run OpenSolaris over GNU/Linux which overcome the slight advantages you've described in Ubuntu's installation process (which really is slick).

1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict.

Why dont the distros use the Fluendo's mp3-plugin. Its Open Source, free, license/patent-fee-free. Am I missing something, any insights about this?

For the one who are not aware of it - http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php :

Any distribution or Unix maker out there who want to include the Fluendo MP3 plug-in with their distribution can do so by just signing a contract with Fluendo to become an official redistributor. This contract includes no monetary compensation to Fluendo for getting the right to redistribute the Fluendo MP3 plug-in and no demands of additional purchases from Fluendo. The main purpose of the contract is to satisfy our upstream contractual requirements. By signing this contract any distribution can support mp3 out of the box without any additional license fee. Take a look at the example contract and contact us at info@fluendo.com for details.

Actually, there's a legal, licensed MP3 decoder available for Linux. http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php It's open source (MIT) with binaries approved by Fraunhofer available. So you're OK even if you do stick strictly to all patent law, live in a country where such law applies to software, and require source to all code running on your system (above BIOS/firmware level).

Those prices are higher than fluendos. You can get a complete bundle that plays everything for €28 which works out at $40.

The big thing here is not that they're offering them for sale, but that they're streamlining the process of the sale. The codecs have always been available for sale through fluendo's store, canonical is just making the process of sale slightly easier. The only thing I'm concerned about is that users will get the wrong message. New convertees to ubuntu (and there are a lot of them) might think that this whole "linux is free" thing is just a scam. Time will tell.

I'll have to check this out. A similar program that hasn't gotten much attention is Elisa. There are packages for Windows and many linux distributions.

I'll have to check this out. A similar program that hasn't gotten much attention is Elisa. There are packages for Windows and many linux distributions.

That question is answered in the link, at least as far as the most common OSI approved licences, GPL, LGPL, MPL...

Neither GNU nor Linux is mentioned in OSI's definition of Open Source.

You may be correct here, but don't be surprised if it does eventually break apart, businesses (especially U.S. based businesses) are accustomed to dealing with extremely complex laws and if GPL gets in the way of the likes of Microsoft/GM/ADM... look out! Many companies have higher revenue than the GNPs of all but the G8 and they don't even like abiding by U.S. tax law, much less Kyoto, WTC etc. GPL is hardly a bit of road-kill, much less an obstacle to the wishes of these mega corprations.

Then you'd better spend your time trying to lobby Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Fraunhoffer, the MPAA... instead of worrying about what license Sun frees its software under. You can blame the bad people who wrote these CODECs or you can look into the real incompatibilities between GPL and codecs, problems which LGPL, BSD, MPL and CDDL don't have:

It hurts Linux's stability by allowing Stallman and thousands of others to live in a fantasy world where GPL's viral nature overcomes Microsoft/Sony/Apple and other IP holders will bow to a non-paying 1% marketshare and make things convenient for this minority. It allows Linus to "not care about ABI stability" because he too lives this fantasy.

It's about not having haemorrhage money through royalties. Fraunhofer can and DO go after companies that don't licence their codec. They won't go after you as a an end user but if you are a commercial Linux vendor with some money and wide distribution...

I think the best that can be done (for those distros that want to bundle binary only stuff) would be to incorporate the Fluendo MP3 codec which has been licensed. As for creating MP3 files and DVDs, well that's another kettle of fish.

I don't like having to install non-free flash. I would have no complaints if a free implementation worked for me, but it doesn't. (And my reasons for complaining about MS office documents go way beyond it being a proprietry format, but I won't go into that - its a different subject and a poor comparison anyway)

Now that Sun's Java is open source, wouldn't it be great if there was an open source Java applet that could download streaming video and audio in an open format that could then be used by everyone, without forcing the poor windows users to install anything new?

Oh, look there already is.

Does that count as offering an alternative that would be acceptable to me?

Your biggest mistake is in over-generalizing. You forget that the open source "zealots" are a HUGE group and have a wide range of different reasons for their opinions. You have simply picked on a few easy targets to attack, and the pretended that they somehow represent the whole group.

Let's compare:

Both MP3 and WMV are restricted by patents
Both MP3 and WMV are both available on Linux illegally
Both MP3 and WMV codecs are available legally from fluendo
WMV is produced by a company you don't like

Pretty much sums it up, huh?

What?

http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php

In reality, the Open Source solution, flumotion is cheaper than pretty much any commercially supported solution. But, it doesn't do DRM for all intents and purposes, which is the thing they're worrying so damn much about.

DRM is why they're doing this BS. Without the DRM, the Open Source friendly, Open Source served solution will beat all of the commercial streaming answers, hands down. Now, having said this, the DRM in the Real Networks commercial Helix server offering is comparable, the players exist pretty much on any relevant platform. Now, is Real's offering all that much more expensive than the Microsoft one- or might it be more expensive overall to go with MS' answer? It's my understanding that they're charging a pretty penny for that WMA support to the people using it.

Mandriva's business model is this:
3 situations, 3 editions

FREE as in FREEDOM:
"Mandriva FREE" dvd.
All rpm inside come from main and contrib repository which are fordidden to non free software. If a rpm in those is non free, it's a mistake.

free as in free beer:
"Mandriva ONE", live-cd:
you can test it all your heart content, then install it if you want.
Proprietary drivers are in there, wifi, 3d, modems, to make easy installation for everyone.

Commercial edition as in value added:
"Mandriva PowerPack", dvd
This one has the same size than the Free Edition, the same proprietary stuff than the ONE, but also has more commercial programs added, like Cedega or Lindvd, and a bunch of others (skype?).

About the codecs problem, the solution chosen is fluendo.
This guys are supporting gstreamer on the free software side and providing linux and solaris native solution for codecs on the closed prooprietary one.
http://www.fluendo.com/presentation.php
http://www.fluendo.com/press/releases/PR-2007-01.html
https://shop.fluendo.com/

Mandriva's business model is this:
3 situations, 3 editions

FREE as in FREEDOM:
"Mandriva FREE" dvd.
All rpm inside come from main and contrib repository which are fordidden to non free software. If a rpm in those is non free, it's a mistake.

free as in free beer:
"Mandriva ONE", live-cd:
you can test it all your heart content, then install it if you want.
Proprietary drivers are in there, wifi, 3d, modems, to make easy installation for everyone.

Commercial edition as in value added:
"Mandriva PowerPack", dvd
This one has the same size than the Free Edition, the same proprietary stuff than the ONE, but also has more commercial programs added, like Cedega or Lindvd, and a bunch of others (skype?).

About the codecs problem, the solution chosen is fluendo.
This guys are supporting gstreamer on the free software side and providing linux and solaris native solution for codecs on the closed prooprietary one.
http://www.fluendo.com/presentation.php
http://www.fluendo.com/press/releases/PR-2007-01.html
https://shop.fluendo.com/

Mandriva's business model is this:
3 situations, 3 editions

FREE as in FREEDOM:
"Mandriva FREE" dvd.
All rpm inside come from main and contrib repository which are fordidden to non free software. If a rpm in those is non free, it's a mistake.

free as in free beer:
"Mandriva ONE", live-cd:
you can test it all your heart content, then install it if you want.
Proprietary drivers are in there, wifi, 3d, modems, to make easy installation for everyone.

Commercial edition as in value added:
"Mandriva PowerPack", dvd
This one has the same size than the Free Edition, the same proprietary stuff than the ONE, but also has more commercial programs added, like Cedega or Lindvd, and a bunch of others (skype?).

About the codecs problem, the solution chosen is fluendo.
This guys are supporting gstreamer on the free software side and providing linux and solaris native solution for codecs on the closed prooprietary one.
http://www.fluendo.com/presentation.php
http://www.fluendo.com/press/releases/PR-2007-01.html
https://shop.fluendo.com/

Not true. There is a gst-fluendo-mp3-2.7.rpm package on the goldmaster DVD. MP3 playback works out of the box. Eat this, american law system.

The American law system won't lose any sleep over this. Fluendo are a commercial venture who have paid the licensing fees for a number of different multimedia formats. They then give you MP3 support as a freebie in the hope that you will pay for other formats. Kind of the drug pusher mentality applied to codecs.

Fluendo already has rights to mp3. http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php. I believe ubuntu put it in universe, though it may be better placed in multiverse. You'll have to ask someone else why it's not in restricted and in by default.

what is Dell supposed to do?

Pay for the codecs. There are legal options.

Adobe currently has web video locked down; Apple, Real, Java, Xiph, and of course Microsoft are all in very niche use compared to Adobe Flash. Adobe Apollo is a direct competitor to Microsoft Silverlight, and with the inertia of Flash video and a large group of web designers already familiar with Flash, plus cheaper a licensing model than Microsoft, it looks like its in with a chance. The typical Microsoft response to fair competition is to compete unfairly. iPlayer, and a number of other high profile 2007 BBC projects, are based on Silverlight technology. Highfield's reponse on the Backstage blog points at the other proprietary technologies the BBC foists on the public, but these are based on previous technology decisions; the new stuff is all Silverlight based. 100,000 iPlayer sign-ups in a week, Martin? That's 100,000 more Silverlight installations. Given Microsoft's other major play to deploy Silverlight is Vista, and we all know how well that's working out for them this year, its outrageous to me that the BBC has paid Microsoft _anything_ for forcing license fee payers to install this key piece of strategic technology for them. Then UK is, afterall, one of the most broadband-saturated and media-consuming audiences, leading the way for other nations - Is the BBC likely to open up a non-zero-price iPlayer to international viewers at somepoint? So this is a big win for Microsoft's bid to control the next stage of web development with Silverlight. The BBC is committed to shipping a cross-platform iPlayer, and its a shame that this becomes the sole focus of the reporting on this issue. An iPlayer for 3 or 4 platforms is 3 or 4 times as worse as an XP-only iPlayer, because it is imposing DRM on even more people, and implying that DRM is acceptable. When it does ship a cross-platform iPlayer, I expect it will be based on Novell's Mono Moonlight for GNU/Linux, probably doing the media codec stuff with the GStreamer framework given that Fluendo, its sponsor, sells Windows Media Codecs already - https://shop.fluendo.com/product_info.php?products _id=45 - and the Mac OS X one might be Mono or Microsoft based. That's going to really help the widespread adoption of Silverlight as the Rich Internet Application platform of choice. In 2007, Google has maintained the dominant position for monetising search and advertising - of the text web. Their purchase of YouTube suggested they were serious about monetising the emerging video web, but the DRM aspects of Silverlight video delivery mean that their ability to provide search and advertising for web video is going to be undermined. So the BBC hasn't just helped Microsoft pull a Adobe-killer, it's also helping Microsoft pull a Google-killer.

If you are in the US and you have a (legitimate) concern over installing only legal software on Linux, then just go here for your multimedia stuff:

http://www.fluendo.com/

Don't go to Automatix (or even more sanely to Medibuntu) if you are in the US, instead get your Linux multimedia software legally via Fluendo.

1. What interest does Fraunhofer have in granting a patent license for the binary version, but not the source? There's no difference in terms of how available the software would become, in principle. The number of installations is bounded by the number of GStreamer installations regardless of whether the package is proprietary or not, since it's freely redistributable (after signing a contract).
2. Given that, realistically, every Linux user in the US can already get a free mp3 decoder, what advantage does Fraunhofer gain by not granting a blanket MP3 patent license for free software?
3. What's going on with the redistribution contract? It seems to have some interesting interactions with the BSD source license.
   • 1.4

     The Distributor might at some point want to make changes and improvements to the Plug-in Source Code used to generate the Plug-in. Such changes shall automatically be copyrighted to Fluendo and Fluendo shall be notified of these changes, so that Fluendo can include them in the official Plug-in Source Code if they so choose. Any such changes will have to be approved in writing by Fluendo or included in the official Plug-in Source code from Fluendo, before a binary incorporating the changes can be shipped by Distributor.

     Uh, so a distributor can't modify the codec without signing the copyrights over to Fluendo?
   • 1.5

     Distributor shall not license or grant any right on the Plug-in or the Plug-in Source Code in a different way than as described in the corresponding licenses made by Fluendo for each of them.

     Doesn't that make it some weird viral BSD license instead of the BSD itself?

Actually, they're free to distribute Fluendo's MP3 decoder.

Ta-da! It's even free of charge. The other codecs (other than MP3 I mean) cost money, but you can get them legally via that. They work using the GStreamer framework (commonly used in GNOME multimedia applications).

Codecs not verified to run on Linux listed here (http://soggie.soti.org/linux/linux-codecs/), here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_ codecs#Operating_system_support) and here (http://labs.divx.com/DivXLinuxCodec) are illegal to use without owning Windows

Legal DVD and MP3 is not a problem outside the US where software patents dont apply. Also you can get plugins legal in the US and other countries stupid enough to allow software patents at https://shop.fluendo.com/

As for the market, what was Linspires market share again? Its not because they have a bad distribution people avoid them. Linspire is really pretty darn good, just run by greedy bastards with no interest in the community that do all their work for free.

If it's such a "deal breaker" he could do as I have done and buy a legal codec pack from Fluendo for properly licensed, good quality MP3, Windows Media, AC3 & MPEG support for GStreamer.

Fluendo currently offer this range of commercially licensed plugins for Linux and Solaris operating systems. The plugins are available to OEM manufacturers who are using GStreamer in their products and for end users through our Fluendo Webshop. For customers with more than 20 seats please contact us through our contact for a quote on a site license.

May I introduce you to Fluendo, a company that does exactly this. They even give away the mp3 codec for free as a promotional activity.

https://shop.fluendo.com/

There is, and it was already mentioned (although only the free mp3 one was mentioned).

I think Ubuntu would be much better off by giving its users a menu of options when it pops up a "This may be illegal!" warning. For example, for playing an MP3, there are 3 options:

* Download free legal MP3 codec from http://shop.fluendo.com/
* Download legally-questionable open-source codec
* Quit

This kind of thing would be a lot less scary to users, and would give them somewhere to go after they've been warned. They could even integrate the Fluendo shop into their repositories somehow to make it as easy as possible.

You didn't look very hard. It's been widely reported (widely enough for someone who actually searches for a solution or asks his Linux distributor) that Fluendo sells some codecs (and DVD player) along with the patent licenses.