Posted by
Roblimo
on from the coming-soon-to-a-computer-near-you dept.
blount writes "An interview with LSDVD developers Paul Volcko and Gad Berger is on moviebone. Paul and Gad discuss DVD crypto, patent and trade secret issues, and their plans for an application supporting hardware and software DVD playback."
they didn't tell me it'd be /.'ed!
by
davek
·
· Score: 5
Well, its nice to be in the group and not be told that there's an interview. O well, I wouldn't have had much to say anyway, and I'm in France. Bummer.
Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
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Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
Carpe Diem,
-Dave Klint
new Dream Theater Oct 26. Giddy!
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky