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Fluendo To Sell Proprietary Codecs For Linux
Several readers wrote in to tell us that the open source media software development company Fluendo has announced plans to sell native Linux implementations of proprietary video codecs such as Windows Media, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. (Press release here.) From the article: "Currently, many Linux video applications facilitate Windows Media video playback using Windows DLL files and Wine, which provides suboptimal performance, particularly with streaming video. Fluendo's codecs could potentially provide better integration for streaming Windows Media playback in Linux web browsers as well as through GStreamer-based desktop applications like Totem."
"Fluendo to TRY to sell proprietary codecs for Linux."
Look at all the flak NVidia's binary-only drivers take from the GNU-types, and those are FREE.
2) I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob.... but frankly, it's still just a binary blob. You have no idea what its really doing.
I guess the vast majority of end-user couldn't care less what their video codec is doing, as long as it plays their damn video's. It's a bit like the NVidea Linux drivers: the free software purists see it as something awful to load a binary driver on Linux, but I for one am very grateful to have proper 3D accelerated drivers at all. Same goes for video playback... There will always be proprietary video codecs, just get over it. I don't see the problem anyway, if I'm want to run commercial software on Linux it is usually binary as well. Does that mean the software is useless or bad?
I suppose the market is Linux distributors who can't bundle MPlayer for legal reasons. Can't see anyone buying this directly, though.
They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer, (a universal video player, home page, debs), as licensing some codecs will require signing up to agreements to play nicely with DRM. MPlayer is good because there's none of that nonsense: it just works, for every video that I've tried.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
NVidia's lamented product is a binary only driver with a binary only kernel component. A codec is application software. The nvidia software runs on the bare metal, interacting with your machine in god knows what ways. The codecs are fairly self-contained. It's not really compariable.
""Fluendo to TRY to sell proprietary codecs for Linux.""
The "your codecs want to be free" crowd will take care of that problem.
Perhaps because of security fears?
Anyway, bringing nvidia into the discussion is a red herring, there is a huge difference between running a binary blob in ring 0 and userland. Let's discuss userland binary rather than kernel mode binary.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Rah rah. I like people trying to sell commercial things on Linux. This will only work if they are johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to updates. I would hate my purchased codecs to keep me from updating gstreamer, the kernel, or whatever. In fact, I should not even have to *think* about my purchased codecs when I run a yum, apt-get, or up2date.
I'll just wait here for the Free Software fire-breathing demons of zealotry. It's quite cold right now and my furnace needs a break.
Stop encoding media using proprietary codecs!
I got hit by the file corruption bug in that's existed in recent 2.6 kernels due to race condition. Was burried pretty deep, took the experts a while to figure out what was going on. I had the source code, so did thousands of other people. The bug still caused lost files. The nvidia driver's a pretty complex piece of code, having to handle many slight differences and implement workarounds for many different cards and chipsets. Nvidia have paid people on the job, with the relevant experience. What makes people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people, when they can't even keep their own codebases bugfree? Bugs happen, and with really complex code, it takes people with the most experience available to find and resolve the problem, properly.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Because it's better for the public good if the drivers are open.
c++;
ok, and what happens when you get 2 blobs, say a video driver and a video codec (handy example) that when used together under certain circumstances hose the system, being from different vendors and with neither accepting responsibility, your stuck, you have re-implement them both in F/OSS.
for this reason amongst others, open source is well worth being evangelical about, and it must be done NOW, with everything on the system.
a/c because im at work =(
But ffmpeg can't be distributed legally in all countries. These codecs are for sale for those people who want be legit - usually companies - common crowd will still stick with gstreamer apps/plugins or mplayer/vlc/ffmpeg combo. I see this Fluendo step as very contributing to choice I can make on Linux system - I can say boss that these codecs can be easily installed in public terminal which aim to provide video serices for example. Just buy a license and vola, you are set.
And kudos to ffmpeg team. I use Totem with gstreamer bad/ugly/ffmpeg combo and I can say - hats off to you guys. Quality is very good.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
it stops distributions that distribute where ffmpeg is legal if the distributor also wants in to the US (etc) market.
e.g. SuSE (even when a german company) didn't do MP3.
I care. While I'm not likely to check the code for trojans and security flaws, I am likely to tinker with it.
Sometimes I need a feature in software that's not already there. Other times, I need to tinker with some hardcoded value or behavior. (Like the time I needed to modify wget to get around a broken robots.txt.) One time, I wanted to use xvidcap, but found that the latest version of the code was old enough as to not compile on a modern GCC. (I'd be happy to release my updated version, if anyone cares.)
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I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob
It's significantly better, actually. Not because it's technically superior (although it may be), but because it can legally be rolled into a commercial version of Linux. Right now, you can't legally distribute a Linux distro with multimedia support (at least not in the U.S.), because they depend either on MS DLLs (obvious copyright problems) or patent-encumbered free implementations (which can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons).
This makes Linux into a second-rate desktop OS, even if you're willing to pay for it, because it means key features don't work out of the box. There have been exceptions to this from time to time (Xandros, Lindows), but they weren't well accepted by the community, possibly because they tried to leverage their use of proprietary codecs as an advantage over other Linux distros, rather than against Windows -- not a good way to make friends.
A company which wasn't involved in the actual production of a distro, might be in a good position (assuming it dealt with everyone on the same terms) to produce codecs that could be incorporated into (a non-free, pay-per-copy) version of any distro. E.g., someone could take Ubuntu, add the codecs (paying Fluendo, obviously), and sell the result as a package, suitable for pre-installation. I don't think this would violate GPL either, if the codecs were built in a way that didn't require linking or otherwise producing a "derived work."
In short, Fluendo could be in a position to be ESR's "Streaming Penguin." In that paper, he discusses some of the major problems facing Linux as a marketable desktop OS, and the lack of modern multimedia capabilities are a real deal-breaker. In fact, the lack of multimedia capabilities are more of a weakness, than simply being free-as-in-beer is a strength; people are obviously willing to pay for an OS that works, but one that doesn't work out of the box (or works only after fiddling around with some shady instructions involving PLF mirrors) won't fly, even if it's free.
While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer. Even if there wasn't Microsoft trying to torpedo it before it gets going, I'm not sure customers would accept anything that didn't work right, right out of the box. Fluendo could, if they play their cards right, be a big benefit to the adoption of Linux.
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> They are covered by patents are therefore is a subject of USAGE restrictions.
What patents you are talking about? I bet you don't have any idea.
> And no, vlc and xine is no use for simple user.
Even if so... type:
% yum install totem-xine
It is Totem with xine backend. If you find it hard to use I really find you retarded.
Speaking for myself, I've been using Linux for a while now and, these days, it is the primary OS I use on my home desktop computer. Windows is still there, but for legacy programs that I still need and I switch off the internet whenever I start Windows (it's WinME).
If you can give me a Linux distribution that is supported and comes bundled with legal implementations of all the codecs at a reasonable price point, I'll buy it. Throw in something like Cedega for games or Crossover Office for other apps (if I even need it at this point) so I can get rid of my Windows installation entirely and that would be an ideal solution for me.
Proprietary, non-free applications are going to be essential to getting Linux into the mainstream. Software sellers aren't interested in an OS they can't sell software to run on.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
2) I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob.... but frankly, it's still just a binary blob. You have no idea what its really doing.
A few things:
a) It is infinitely better than a windows dll because it works (my machine is x86_64. windows blobs won't work there)
b) I don't have windows. How can I get windows binary blobs without buying windows or breaking the law?
c) True, I don't know what it's really doing, but it comes down to trust. I have personally met spoken to some of the fluendo/gstreamer folks and I trust them a hell of a lot more than some unknown devs at MS who I'll never even know the names of let alone meet and talk to.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Noooo, missed my point - there may be those hundreds of developers that work on the kernel, but it took the very select few, that had the proper experience and knowledge of the code and design, to track it down and fix it. The team of kernel developers could have been 5000, or it could have been 5. Sometimes, it's not the hands and the eyes, it's the right hands and the right eyes. Experience is very important in a complex codebase.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
MPEG2 and MPEG4 have LONG been supported by ffmpeg, mplayer, xine, and vlc. As for Windows media, libavcodec in mplayer has supported decoding Windows Media 7 and 8 natively for some time now, and just recently support was added for WMV9 (aka VC-1, the latest Windows Media codec used on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) using, again, a fully open-source decoder.
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I wonder if these Codecs could also be made to run under Solaris or BSD or other open source OSes?
Even for the people who use i386, this means there would be a legal codec so the big distos could include it with video players out of the box
No, they didn't. There was some confusion about what issue was fixed with what fix. People concluded it took years, while in fact they were confusing two different issues.
A.Supported by ffmpeg/libavcodec/whatever else through open source implementations The only way for United States residents to lawfully use open source implementations is to leave the country. B.Supported already through binaries on linux (such as the RealPlayer binary codec libraries) Are the w32codecs lawful to redistribute under copyright and patent law?
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Designing and implementing the software - you're right, in general. But in terms of finding bugs, frequently an outsider does better. It's practically a cliche in programmer circles that the bug you've been fruitlessly hunting for two days will be solved when a coworker looks over your shoulder for five seconds and says, "Oh, hey, there it is."
Many bugs are syntactic, not semantic. And someone who's familiar with the syntax, but not necessarily all the semantics, can spot things that others miss. Put in less technical terms, they see what the code actually does whereas someone who works with it constantly may just see what it's supposed to do.
And other bugs are related not to the problem domain per se but the way it relates to other domains. The Nvidia/Apple bug discussed here recently was due not to any deep graphics issue, but by improperly using memory - probably a signed value where an unsigned is required, so that hitting memory over 2GB does Bad Things. Yeah, I'd believe a relatively untrained programmer might spot that.
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Agreed, ffmpeg has the ability to decode these same formats, and on alternate arches to boot. The difference is that the use of ffmpeg may not be legal in your jurisdiction due to the lack of patent licenses. This is most likely to matter to, say, broadcasters.
Personally, I'm not very excited about paying money for essentially patent licenses. I supposed I'm resigned to being a patent license transgressor rather than monetarily supporting the patent holders. (Of course I also have the option of eschewing the content entirely, and mostly (but not entirely) do.)
-josh
Keep in mind that this exact same functionality is _free_ under Windows. No it's not you fool. You pay $200 for a copy of Windows; a significant portion of that goes to licensing codecs. You just don't notice it when you buy a computer with Windows bundled in, so you think it's free. Sure, if you pirate Windows, it's free, and if you use ffmpeg on Linux it's free. This solution is illegal in the US, and entirely useless to OEM vendors.