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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."
Will it strip out DRM so we can listen to our own music on our own machines without hassle?
Really, the time of DVD on desktop computers for anything other than loading software and (if it's a burner) burning DVDs is gone, gone, gone. Long live the cheapo "hacked by Chinese" DVD player.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Could someone please explain how this adds any functionality that mplayer doesn't already have?
I've never come across a movie that mplayer wasn't able to play.
With this, I can do all Quicktime trailers, Windows Media streams, you name it. Heck, you get the RealPlayer codecs and you can do that too.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
thanks to Linux's memory protection and I/O abstraction, nothing affects system reliability unless it goes through the kernel ... 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?
No, no, you have a fair point that I hadn't considered. I agree with you completely - No kernel mods, this should at worst crash the player in question, not the whole system.
I do, though, have to wonder if (at least) WMP9 support requires a (binary-only, of course) kernel module to enforce its DRM... If so, my earlier comment on stability would still apply. If not, will this allow playback of protected content, or have they glossed over that small omission from full compatibility?
Free download was never a GPL requirement to begin with. Legend has it that RMS used to sell Emacs at $150 per tape, you can currently pay $345 for a pair of CDs full of GPL source code from the FSF.
If you are really interested, I suggest you read the GPL. To speed things up, Sections 2 and 3 answer your question (note, 2b "no charge for the license" doesn't preclude charging for the download, the CD, or whatever method of giving the person the software you care to do, it's the license that is Free, not the media).
That, and as a prior poster indicated, the Media Player stuff isn't GPL'ed by a long shot.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Currently, the Media 9 codecs have probably the best licensing of any complete advanced codec out there. They are an open standard, sumbitted to and accepted by STMPE meaning it can't be changed with out STMPE's approval (and those changes being made public). This is the same as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. The difference is in the cost, the media 9 codecs cost a good bit less to license than either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4.
That's something a lot of people forget about beloved projects like LAME and Xvid. The projects themselves are probably legal, protected as academic works since they are source only. That does not mean you may legally use them. The formats they encode are open standards, but ones that are licensed. What's more, MPEG-4 has a content use fee, you have to pay $0.04 per 2 hours of content.
Now for audio, the solution is simple at this point: Vorbis. It is available for use free of charge. However their video codec isn't yet complete. Well all the other formats are either proprietary, or open but licensed. Even MP3 decoders need a license. All those free MP3 decoder projects that haven't paid it ($60,000 one time fee I believe) are technically illegal to use.
In practise the MPEG group and companies like Microsoft have more or less ignored people that use their standards without a license when not for profit, however that doesn't make it legal.
So until there is a free video standard, you either need to choose a quite old standard (MPEG-1 might be free of licenseing but I am not sure), pay a license fee, or you'll be infringing. That is true if you use MPEG-4 or WM-9. Main difference is WM-9 is cheaper.
Now before you shoot back about MS locking people in, read my post again carefully. WM-9 is no longer proprietary. They submitted it to SMPTE as an open standard. What this means is that anyone can implement WM-9 for a standard licensing fee (called a reasonable and non-discriminitory license, or RAND license). It also means they can't make any future changes to break compatibility since any change has to be submitted to SMPTE and if accepted will be made available to all who licensed the format.
This is the exact same way that MPEG-4 works.