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

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[Anonymous Coward]

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software gaps?

[tsmithnj]

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. I'm sorry. How does disassembling a program address mediocre driver support?

Re:Reverse Engineered From The Disassembly

[SilentChris]

A less trivial (and possibly more legal) undertaking would have been to code a new framework from scratch. As it stands right now, this looks to be on very tenuous ground: not only is it questionale from a legal standpoint but it plain old looks bad (we complain that MS "embraces and extends" all the time -- how is this any different?).

I much prefer *actual* open source projects. Not open source derived from disassembly of closed source. If we want this movement to gain more traction, this is NOT the way to do it.

Re:Look! It's a Windows user!

[mo^]

Why would you wanna do that. then youd have to realise that XP comes on a single CD unlike the 4 redhat disks i got for linux (yep, windows geek, linux fiddler, and happy to be that way)

Let the flames commence