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Sigma Designs/XVid Update
Reagen Ward and many other people have written in with updates to the Sigma Designs/XVid situation, reported a few days ago. Sigma has replied in email and a press release that they intend to make the source code available, however, they seem to be paying lip service at best to the terms of the GNU Public License. Grant Gross from Newsforge has been pursuing the story and in a story yesterday and another today lays out the current situation.
Releasing the affected code under the GPL is lip service?
No, it's exactly what is supposed to happen.
They are probably referring to other things than the actual release. They don't give any credit to XVID. From the press release:
"We are pleased to provide the development community with an open source MPEG-4 CODEC, and anticipate that this will accelerate technical improvements and enhance the proliferation of MPEG-4 content," stated Ken Lowe, Sigma Designs' vice president of business development. (emphasis mine)
It makes you think they did all the work. The download page acknowledges that they "had utilized some routines posted by XVID as open source," but the tone is that they did all the hard work. Which isn't what I came to understand when reading the evindence.
Of course, now we have the source, it'll be interesting to make a more detailed study on how much code was copied.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
"First an update on the XviD situation. The release of the Sigma source code does not mean it's all over, it's far from being over. The license agreement which you have to agree to before you can download, and install the codec is not compatible with the GPL. Furthermore, it can now clearly be seen (download the source code and have a look for yourself) that the Sigma codec is pretty much a copy of the XviD codec, but all the copyright notices of the original developers have been removed and replaced. This does not only violate the GPL but copyright laws - you can't just take a program, change a few lines and change the copyright statements, you only have copyright protection for the parts you wrote on your own. And related to this the Sigma codec also contains code taken from the OpenDivX project, the files were outfitted with 2 different copyright notices which is quite funny."
I hope that Sigma will respect GPL licences. I will for sure stop every purchase of Sigma stuff where I work.
Plus I had some self encoded TV episodes using DivX 5, and they had a VBR MP3 audio stream, the XCard plays the audio, and the video is completely out of sync (speeding up, slowing down - as though it is using the VBR timings)... and the player crashes after 5 mins.
: www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_news_old.html+avery+ lee+nandub+hack&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
While all your other points on the card may or may not be valid (I'm not going to dispute them, in other words), I will take a moment to dispute this one. VBR MP3 audio streams in a DivX file is a complete and utter hack. Anyone who knows about the internals of AVI files will recognize this instantly. That it was made to work and play back correctly in Windows is actually due to a bug in the decoder itself, and should Microsoft ever fix this bug, all VBR MP3 audio interleaved in AVI files will suddenly either lose sync or perform exactly as the XCard.
References:
Can't find it on the new (redesigned) website, but here's the google cache.
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:bqcAKNs_G2cC