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Native Sorenson Playback Comes to Linux
Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.
but articles like this really do point out the weakest points of it. If your strong into multimedia (graphic design, sound mixing, 3D modeling, etc). You're still better off in most cases to be using a Win/Mac machine with a much more mature and complete software solutions. This isn't a knock against linux or other *nix's just points out what the weakest links are.
Stuff them, release it AC somewhere, post it here, then by the time somebody starts to "cease and desist" it'll be too late.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Definitely agree with some of the above posters--release it anonymously and securely. This sounds like a job for... Freenet!
If you read the thread you will see that the author looked at Apple's QT binaries for codebooks to decode some of the encodings. I'm sure there are EULAs that prohibit this. This patch is going to have a lot of legal problems. That's a shame because it is a big boost for QT and thus for Apple, but that's the way it is. I grabbed a copy of it so that when they get an injunction from Apple I'll still be able to post it somewhere in the Free World (ie, not in the US).
saying divx is better than quicktime is like saying msie is better than the gimp
they dont compare
qt is a container
you could say qt sucks avi is better
or sorensen sucks divx is better
but not qt sucks divx is better.
Well it seems a lot of people has some missunderstanding regarding Sorensen and Apple. So let's get it right: Apple don't own Sorensen what Apple owns is the exclusive right to distribute Sorensen for use in video playback (wich is why they complained when it was going to be used in Flash also. They have to enforce contracts like these or they will be invalid).
This isn't redistribution however. As far as I understand it's a standard QT for Windows that's running under Linux (that's what Wine does. Makes windows apps run under Linux - right?). So it don't change anything. On the other hand someone posted that they have reverse engineered some of the binaries from QT. Depending on if it's Apples binaries or Sorensens one of the two might not like that (Sorensen most of all perhaps. Since they have an interrest in protecting their technology).
So what you're saying is that, at the moment, there is no alpha support, usable configuration, resolution and color depth changing, or VNC support, and that there is also no color management support in X applications -- is the XCMS broken? Why don't people use it? Color management gets used on Macs. Why not X, if it's been supported for 15 years?
SO your post comes down to, "We can use freetype to render truetype fonts." Yeah, okay, what about the -ugly-and-wierd-font-descriptors-it-uses?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The whole purpose of MPEG-4 is that it takes the player out of the game. All that matters is that you can decode/encode MPEG-4. In a year or two, Sorenson should be irrelevant, and XINE will just need MPEG-4 support.
That being said, doesn't MPEG-4 have some pretty herendous licensing restrictions of its own?
Slashdotter's, none the less, should be campaigning for sites to support MPEG-4 . If they want Linux, and *BSD to become fully supported across streaming sites.