MPlayer Licence Trouble With A Twist

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 29, 2003 @09:14AM from the life-is-messy-sometimes dept.

protonman writes "A hefty flame war has broken loose on the debian-devel mailinglist about (amongst other things) the legality of mplayer. The interesting part in this conflict is that unlike in previous alledged GPL violations, the culprit is not the unwillingness to provide the source, but the prohibition of the distribution of binaries, thereby violating section 6 of the GPL: 'You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.' Read also the blurb on the MPlayer homepage."

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Obligatory VLC Reference by philovivero · 2003-01-29 09:22 · Score: 3, Offtopic

Not VNC, VLC. Videolan Client.

It's a way to stream video content from a server and view it on a client, but as a nice side-effect, it's a DVDCSS-enabled DVD player, and a pretty good one at that. It's not skinnable, it uses your built-in OS widgets, so it's not as ugly as all the other media players. It looks like it belongs on your desktop with all your other apps.

Mplayer seems to have much better DivX/MJPEG/blah/blah support than VLC, however, so you can't just go whacking mplayer from your HDD. Sorry.

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fifth sigma, inc.