Logitech MSN Webcam Codec Reverse-Engineered

Alexis Boulva writes "Tonight, Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is 100% legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts."

Comments

Wonderful!

[DarkHelmet]

Yup... just as I thought.

The only thing preventing the free / open-source community from reaching fruition is access to young 18+ sluts on webcam.

Thank you Ole André! You've given us geeks accessibility to the last 5% of the Internet's perversity that we couldn't access before.

God, I love you, man! I knew this glorious day would come!

Re:Wonderful!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dark Helmet? Try relaxing your grip.

Look! It's a nerd!

[Thijs van As]

So you can now finally watch your fellow linux nerds hacking their fav open source project.

WTF?

[gowen]

Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts

Is it just me, or has slashdot started to sound more an more like TASS did in the mid-80s

Re:WTF?

[dos_dude]

Tonight, the federation of the FOSS (farmers operating socialist software) announced that it has fullfilled its five-year plan to produce high quality socialist software that is better than the imperialist's product.

Since the late 90s, the imperialists have been using "web cams" to form monopolies, rage wars, and perform other counter-revolutionary crimes.

With the liberation of the MSN protocol, another battle in the fight against the imperialist pigs was gloriously won. The revolutionary forces may now use the imperialist's network to spread hype and FUD, and to cooperatively work on the liberation of even more imperialistic protocols in a very efficient manner.

Together with the presentation techniques that the FOSS has liberated from the counter-revolutinary Power Point application, the MSN web-cam protocol will give the revolutionary forces the means of production that our great leaders chose to include in their plans five years ago.

I don't want it!

[Pants75]

It gives me comfort having no evidence that the person I'm chatting with is a trucker called Bubba.

Re:software gaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much the same way bitching about medicore driver support on slashdot does.

Look! It's a Windows user!

[ImaLamer]

No, it's more like: now you can watch windows users re-install in real time!

Glory be unto us!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts.

Wonderful! The war on proprietary software is going well. I'm looking for a press release, does anyone know where I can contact the Open Source Ministry of Truth? Hmmm... I seem to be there.

Re:All professional VTC is open source anyway...??

[Anonymous Coward]

"You know, if you switch to Linux, you can chat with H.323 and MSN users."

It sure sounds better than "Linux is better, and that's why it won't let you video chat with MSN users.".