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Jon Bringing WMV9 to Linux
julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."
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sit in his chair with those two big brass ones?
This
Thanksgiving night, and there's still enough of us sitting around doing nothing better than looking at /. that the pictures are already down.
When will people learn not to get links to their blogs on the main page of /. ?
Here's the Google Cache link.
To watch porn, duh.
I have a mother in law who is Hungarian, when she visits, she watches hungarian language programming, offered only in, windows media format.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's people like DVD Jon who make me feel like a total sham everytime someone calls me a "computer genius". What's he got for us next?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I suppose I'm pleased that this will give me access to a wider range of material playable on my Linux boxen. On the other hand, I feel uneasy, knowning almost certainly that this isn't legal (C'mon, this is DVD Jon!). While I might disagree with the law, isn't Linux still trying to regain respectability after the SCO accusations? They may have been false, but claims of pirated software in Linux wrt this are almost certainly true.
- Story
- Screenshot 1
- Screenshot 2
--J.Heh, DVD Jon uses gnome and fedora! Noob! ... no wait...
From the article linked to the blog post, it seems that he got the reference decoder for the VC-1 standard, which is compatible with WMP9, to work in VLC. The headline makes it look like there was some sort of reverse engineering done here, but after actually reading the article (gasp), it doesn't seem like that's the case.
Of course, noone in the linux community give a ripe fuck about whether or not the code they run is legal.
Fool!
That's all we care about. Why do you think we make so much of an issue about companies making exclusive deals to release video and audio in formats that don't have any sort of official support from the format creator? It's not like we own DVD-audio players and our music only comes in SACD; the ability to play WM9 is only several hundred lines of code away and yet we're expected to purchase a completely different operating system to be able to play them.
The sad story about using "illegal" code in Linux (isn't libdvdread still like this?) is that it is often more useful than the a) hard to find b) not that great altenative. I personally find that where there is both a commercial and free version of a linux program ported from Windows, the commercial version acts like cripple-ware.
Direct away from face when opening.
Just not legally. Of course, noone in the linux community give a ripe fuck about whether or not the code they run is legal.
You got modded flamebait but you raise a valid point, Linux previously did try and adhere to legality whenever possible. There was the whole not including a mp3 codec debacle.
I have proposed a Black Hat Linux, it will come with a windows installer on the same DVD and a bunch of closed source apps.
Unfortunatly I also believe in the Linux movement, the idea of freeing all software may be forwarded more rapidly by creating free alternatives and having them widely adopted to the extent that no one will WAMT to pay for software, (as opposed to everyone agreeing to steal it and driving the closed source companies out of business). Either way would accomplish the same purpose.
According to the blog, it seems it uses VC-1 reference decoder to play WMV9 on Linux. IIRC VC-1 is open source now after it was submit to SMPTE for the review. Is there any difference between VC-1 and WMV9 except for four CC code and other trivial things?
Also, at the first glance at the headline of this story, I'd thought DVD Jon cracked DRM on WMV9 and delighted, but he didn't apparently, so non-Linux people don't have much to rejoice about this story anyway. If I'm mistaken and this story can be related to Windows Media DRM somehow, please point it to me as I'm happy if that's true.
The worst thing about this is that if software companies actually *supported* Linux, they would never have to deal with any of this. They are forcing people to crack copy protection so they can view media that they purchased online. I don't really understand it. There's Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and its market share is roughly equal to that of Linux. It really wouldn't be that hard for Microsoft to release a generic codec pack for Linux.
Hasn't this been possible all along, with MPlayer? Their codec status table lists "Windows Media Video 9 DMO" as working. Is that not the same thing as the WMV9 referred to here?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
People people.... Jon just has access (legally this time) to the VC1 reference codec and sources. He simply decided to look at how easy it was to use this in VLC. From what i remember (this was more than 6 weeks ago or something) it was half a days work. Mind you that he didn't release anything. He doesn't need to. He said that the VC1 licensing terms are less strict than MPEG4 and Jon can just use the sources after the VC1 codec is 100% final, which isn't too far off. (btw. MPEG group should really get their act together, cause VC1 truly has better licensing atm and people are getting fed up with the MPEG mess).
It does not seem that DVD Jon has completely released his project yet, so if you are want to play WMVs in linux now, try using xine. Quote from the xine site: "...It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives...". With the small collection of trailers and a few movies from lmule (it's like emule), I have not experienced one problem with xine.
I think, you might have missed, a few, commas. I know Wil Wheaton posts to Slashdot, but I didn't know about Shatner.
At least not how you are thinking of open source. It's an open standard, controlled by SMPTE, that you can license. Thus it's probabaly illegal to use this without paying the license fee. So it's open in that anyone can get it, it's controlled by a standards body, not MS, but it's not OSS.
Now VC-1 and WM-9 are pretty much the same, and at this point it's not a huge streatch to take the VC-1 code and develop it to a full blown WM-9 player (which he seems to have done). However MS could chanve the WMV format at any time they like, and break compatibility. VC-1 will remain what ti is and they can't change it without SMPTE's approval (which makes the changes available to everyone), however WMV isn't necessiarly going to be the same thing.
WMV9 (a.k.a. VC-1) and H.264 are not yet in the standard for the HD-DVDs. They were sent to SMPTE for approval as standards in the HD-DVD standard. Microsoft apparently did some futzing and might have WMV9 disqualified due to some fibs told to SMPTE.
Currently there is a codec for WMV9, Microsoft owns it. Some other companies have liscensed it. The standard might be available but it takes a long time to work out an efficient codec that gives a good picture. In a few years it may be at a quality where TV stations will use it for interstation to air broadcast. But that is whith proffesional coders working on it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
this appears to be using the vlc and vc-1 source code to give vlc wmv support. no dlls needed and it should compile and work just peachy on your platform (might require some #ifdef work to take care of the endian differences, but should be a relatively trivial operation)
...note that this type of work may become illegal if the EU embraces software patents.
As you're in the one region of the world that seems to not be bowing down to corporate interests at every opportunity, please do what you can to ensure it doesn't happen.
I *want* to watch video on my Linux box; I don't want to have to buy MS product just so my kids can watch movies that we've paid for.
Incase you are wondering, why port WM9 to linux?
Some HDTV quality video is only in WM9, and some HDTV-DVD's also. Also for those pay music services that only use WM9.
http://www.wmvhd.com/
I wonder what Microsoft is gonna have Jon charged with?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Q. What's a valid patent?
A. One that hasn't been tested in court.
Who's to say that there's any valid IP in WMV9 ? Of all organisations, MS and the US Patent Office are the last I'd trust to tell me.
What nationality is she when she isn't visiting?
The answer for a video decoder is 10 cents per unit with a $40,000 cap. Windows Media Licensing Fees and Royalties (September 2004)
You want to see Linux on every desktop? Would it kill you to admit that shelling out the bucks to license proprietary technologies that might actually get you there makes some sense?
None of the commercial Linux distros are going to touch a decoder that has "lawsuit" written all over it.
You only really need a decoder, because there's plenty of other, much more open formats to encode into when you're on a Linux system.
WMV is a closed, proprietary codec. Please don't encode your files into that format. }:)
-Z
Oh, I hope we're a step closer to freeing up DRM restricted WMV files and here's why...
I bought (as in I paid for) WMV files from MLB.com of this year's baseball playoffs because I didn't save my TiVo'd copies and wanted to have the games in my personal archive. At MLB.com, they used advertising verbiage like "watch them whenever you want!" and "burn them to CD!". Apparantly I didn't read the fine print close enough (or maybe it wasn't in the fine print), but those files are heavily DRM restricted. I have to be connected to the internet and log onto MLB.com to watch them. And even then, I can't even fast forward. Pathetic.
All I wanted to do was to convert them DVD-compatible MPEG2 for MY USE. I want to watch them on my TV instead of my computer. I paid for them and I should be able to view them somewhere other than my PC. I searched high and low and couldn't find a way to break the DRM. Sheesh, it's not like I'm trying to do anything that could be construed as illegal, at least by any rational person. Really frustrating.
If Jon's thing helps free these files in a way that will allow me to media-shift them, then I'm all for it! Even if it's not so I can watch them on Linux. Heck, I've had to use DeCSS to extract MPEG files from DVDs of MY OWN HOME VIDEOS because the original tapes were damaged. How pathetic is it that I needed a tool like that in order to view files that I and I alone own copyright on?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Total rubbish. India was known as India long before. Hindustan was never a word used by the British. Columbus genuinely thought he had found India: that's why the Caribbean islands are known, even today, as the "west Indies". As others have pointed out, your "in dios" explanation is totally bogus, but it's typical of slashdot that you'll get a +5 informative for it.
If you're worried that owners of the linked sites won't get usage statistics, the cache could be set up to count how many times it was accessed, and the statistics could be emailed to the site owner. The email would look something like this:
You get the idea.The Video Codec is WMV3, the whole shebang together with the new audio Codec and lots of DRM is just called Windows Media 9!
;-) I've been waiting for that for a long time, and the WMV3-videos that wouldn't run with Mplayer and VLC REALLY started to piss me off...
Thank you, Jon!
"The critical question is: why? There's no legitimate reason to want WMV."
You're right. Linux is so much better off with fewer capabilities.
"Derp de derp."