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.

Comments

Licensing? Patents?

[JoshuaDFranklin]

Licensing? Patents?

Someone care to explain what the team did about
these little problems?

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[prockcore]

Yes please tell.. I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive (note, only video, the audio is QDM1 which I haven't done yet) I haven't released it due to blatent patent infringement :) but if Sorenson isn't going do to anything about it.. I may release it after all.

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[HeUnique]

Here's a snippet from an email which was posted on FFMPEG's mailing list:

From: Arpi
To: ffmpeg-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

Date: Yesterday 23:02:26

Hi,

I've just examined xine's fresh working SVQ1 decoder. It's implemented in a ~60k .c file, and uses a 90k .h containing the tables.

Looking at the source, it looks like SVQ1 is a tricky h263 variant - as gerard also noticed some time ago. They crypted (don't worry, just order
change and some xor) the first 4 bytes of the header, to hide it's a h263 one. Ah, and they replaced the patented DCT by recursive VQ.
And, they use YVU9 (chrominance 4x4 subsampled) instead of YV12 (2x2 subsampling).

So, as you can see, the SVQ1 guy who wrote the native decoder, replaced the sorenson patented stuff with something free..

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[Peter Harris]

1) Bad laws get made.

2) Laws are hard to remove once they are in place.

3) The only way to get real discussion on bad laws sometimes is to defy them.

4) It is not unethical per se to break a law. It's just that laws are generally made to prohibit unethical behaviour.

If the letter of the law also has the side-effect of prohibiting some ethical behaviour, what do you do? You do what your conscience permits and take responsibility for your own actions.

By the way, to head off any stupid straw-man arguments like "what if you think it's OK to kill children?", forget it. Stick to the point. If you have a real reason to believe it is OK for big corporations to restrict what ideas humans can think and write and implement in code, let's hear it.

Personally, I think it would be easier to defy the abuse of patents in this way than to defy the abuse of copyright law. It should be harder to make the case that someone is "stealing" something they wrote *themselves*.