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."

Comments

What about VideoLAN or MPlayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just use the VideoLAN Client or MPlayer? Both play WMV files on my Linux box without problems...

-H

Re:What about VideoLAN or MPlayer?

[sugar and acid]

The real concern here is that the MPlayer fully installed is dubious legally. That is why Suse and probably a few other distros only come with crippled versions that can not play WMV files and the like, though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere, but obviously this is out of the scope of the Suse companies legal culpibility. In the plan put forth your really paying for a licence to use the said technology, as the implementation has already been around in linux for a while now.

Re:Real Player?

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

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.

I got a different message from this press release

[joeysmith]

Turbolinux engineers developed new software called Turbo Media Player that works with xine, a widely-used Linux media engine, to make it possible for customers to watch streaming video in Windows Media format.

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

Ethics of TurboLinux

[Technician]

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.

Re:Ethics of TurboLinux

[Quattro Vezina]

TurboLinux, SCO/Caldera, SuSE, and Connectiva were once part of an alliance called UnitedLinux, intent on creating a united Linux distribution.

No member of UnitedLinux owned another. They put out one release, and once the litigation started, everything stalled. United is effectively no more--they still technically exist, but all operations are dead.

One thing interesting is that UnitedLinux had one member for each major geographic area except Africa. North America had SCO/Caldera, South America had Connectiva, Europe had SuSE, and Japan had TurboLinux.

Re:Wait a sec...

[jefe7777]

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?

Re:I can do the same thing

[cbreaker]

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..

Re:This isn't actually a bad thing...

[tepples]

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?

Re:Headline is a lie

[spike-288]

Wrong spirittraveller, Turbolinux spent several months negotiating their license with MS. Read this article before you shame the slashdot editors... http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5201352.html

Re:PowerPC?

[bmidgley]

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.

Re:Unreasonable pricing

[kforeman]

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.

Re:This isn't actually a bad thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Er? your post is logical enough, but why would a media player codec need its own kernel module? Unless you are rendering WMP9 in hardware?

Under Windows, the sound drivers participate in something called "Secure Audio Path", meaning that they have been inspected and signed by Microsoft to prove that they will not allow the user to save audio data to disk or otherwise defeat the DRM. Under GNU/Linux, there are any number of ways to capture the digital audio data before it passes through an analog conversion, including:

• 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.

Nope, guess again

[Sycraft-fu]

In a bid to become the HD-DVD standard, Microsoft has made WM-9 an open standard. What that means is that they submitted their standard to the appropriate body, SMPTE in this case, and it has been accepted. Part of this acceptance is that it be made available for a reasonable and non-discriminitory fee. That means that ANYONE can license them for the same fee. You don't negoiate it, it is a fixed thing. There is a page with fee schedules and comparisons to other formats on their site.

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.