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Turbolinux Licenses Windows Media 9
spike-288 writes "According a press release, Turbolinux is the first major Linux distributor to license and ship a media player capable of streaming Windows Media audio and video. The new product, "Turbolinux 10 F..." is based on Turbolinux 10 Desktop but will also include licensed versions of Macromedia Flash, legal commercial DVD playback (via Cyberlink's PowerDVD player), RealPlayer 8, commercial Kanji fonts and iPod support via gtkpod (including enhanced functionality)." Update: 04/28 02:33 GMT by T : Prostoalex adds "The Windows Media codecs for Linux will be available for download for $64, the complete TurboLinux OS will cost $150 in Japan and the United States."
-H
Well honestly this is a good step in the direction for linux adaptation. And linux has real player anyways, but the adoption of major programs can easily lead to a higher conversion to linux, especially for people tied closely to certain apps. Btw, even if it is not licsensed fully, xine does a good job of playing real streams and of playing streaming window media feeds.
je suis parce que j'aime
Perhaps I misread, but this article seems to be saying that they used xine to play WMF, and makes no reference whatsoever to licensing WM 9.
However, they do appear to have an agreement with Cyberlink.
As for being "the first major Linux distributor to license and ship a media player capable of streaming Windows Media audio and video", well, I've been doing this for quite some time now, thanks to apt-get install mplayer
Umm, Wasn't TurboLinux bought by SCO? A quick Google search brings up the snip- SCO has announced a number of professional services offerings around TurboLinux's TurboLinux and SuSE's Linux
I don't plan on supporting SCO in any way until the litigation is over.
The truth shall set you free!
Maya runs on linux, and it's not free.
Oracle runs on linux, and it's not free.
So they have a media player, that's licensing windows media player code, so it can play windows media.
and it's not free.
what doesn't compute?
a Windows XP Professional OEM license.
All they say is that it is capable of playing Windows Media files, by using its own "Turbo Media Player" which works with xine.
My guess is that "Turbo Media Player" is nothing more than a front-end for xine (ala Totem), with xine doing all the work.
It's already possible to play Windows Media files in Linux... this is nothing new at all.
The thing about Cyberlink ProDVD is kind of interesting, but definitely not on the same newsworthiness scale as a Linux distro licensing MS technology would be.
Shame on you Slashdot editors... shame shame shame !
But it's a grey area and although never really pushed into court, you're not technically supposed to use some of those DLL's without a windows license.
Most of the codec packages are given to you "if you own a legal copy of windows."
So yea, it works, but if a major distribution started making big bucks and came with these dll's on the CD, it might see the courtroom..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I (and I think many of us) consider Linux as embodying freedom (in both the RMS and and the beer senses) in the IT world.
It depends on what you're putting before the slash in */Linux. Your view corresponds to "GNU" before the slash, just like the Debian contract. However, some Linux-based operating systems such as Lycoris and Linspire have different goals that they use the same kernel to meet.
And third, I do consider it nice to have native (rather than the hack MPlayer and the like use) support for a given format, but not at the expense of making Linux have the same stability as Windows.
Remember that thanks to Linux's memory protection and I/O abstraction, nothing affects system reliability unless it goes through the kernel, and as long as you haven't tainted your kernel with a "GPL\0which stands for Greedy Private License" driver, a few proprietary apps shouldn't break the increased reliability that the free software process brings to the rest of your system. Or what evidence can you provide against my assertion?
I was the sole developer of TurboLinux/PPC.
The problem is that the company always had a "healthy" sense of competition between the US and Japanese offices. Since the PPC effort was done from the US office, they didn't do a whole lot with it in Japan.
When TurboLinux ran out of money, they sent all the US employees home and sold off the Japanese office. So the side here that actually did PPC stuff was dismantled.
Whine whine whine, piss and moan. Look, if you really want to get paid, go open up a charity or something. Here in the US, and in many parts of the world, we have a free market, and you're gonna have to compete on it against our free code. Got a problem with it? Go to cuba, I hear they're still communist, and they'll gladly pay you to keep working.
Free Software is not communist in any way, but neither is it capitalist. It is Free of any economic system and is focused completely on the rights of the end-user. You want to steal my rights from me? Fascist. You can have my rights when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
You programmers who don't have rich parents and don't want to live in your parent's basement that need to get paid for your work must know that something like 90% of all development is in-house stuff that never sees the light of day. Probably less than 1% of all development is actually products that reach market, and most of those are games!
Quit whining, fucker. If Free Software causes software to no longer be sold as product, it's effect on the marketplace will be minimal at worst, completely unnoticeable at best.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Motown, well put. Thanks for your support. Our plan is to bring out the 100% open source Helix Player (inc Vorbis anfd Theora support) and it superset cousin, the RealPlayer 10 for Linux (inc. non-open source components like RA/RV, MP3, Flash, etc. on top of the Helix Player) this summer. Alpha for both is scheduled for May 10th.... Kevin Foreman GM, Helix RealNetworks, Inc.
Kevin Foreman
implying that it's illegal to use DeCSS based solutions to do so.
Or worse yet, implying that DeCSS is the only way to play DVD's in Linux. I don't even think it's the preferred method. libdvdcss works quite nicely, and doesn't rely on a warez'd CSS key to do the job.
- An LD_PRELOAD library that captures accesses to
/dev/dsp or another sound device - A modified kernel sound module that saves the audio data
- Setting the recording source to the sound output
- Emulate the entire system and capture sound output (such as with UML, Bochs, Mac-On-Linux, etc)
Basically, it is impossible to enforce DRM unless every component all the way down to hardware is under the media providers' control. Which means it is impossible to enforce DRM in Free Software.Real and Quicktime aren't any better. Quicktime now uses MPEG-4, which is also an open standard with RAND licensing. It is, however, more expensive than WM-9. Real is still proprietary and thus up to Real networks as to what is available to who and for how much.
So no, MS is not gouging Linux. If the company that chooses to implement it gouges you, that's their bussiness and you should take it up with them. The license is standard, and the terms are known to the world, just like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4.
These two could be done on Windows as well
No. A "modified kernel sound module" wouldn't get logo'd and signed by Microsoft WHQL, and "emulat[ing] the entire system" could be detected, as extant emulators have their telltale signatures, which is why Secure Audio Path doesn't work on VMware.