On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 17:45 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote: > Ow Mun Heng wrote: > > I'm just curious regarding the licenses of the media files such as > > avi/mpg/mpeg2/mp3/wmv/mov/divx/ etc..etc. > > > > I know that mp3 definately needs licensing from fraunhoffer if anyone > > wants to use/sell a product commercially. (which is why it's not > > included in Fedora) > > > > Is there any others?? I know for sure ogg is GPL. > > Actually, Ogg (which includes FLAC: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/) is > mostly BSD-style: http://old.lwn.net/2001/0301/ > http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html > > .avi is a container format (not too dissimilar to Ogg, come to that). > It's status depends on the encoding being used. I *think* the same is > true for .wav. > > There are three basic problems with the others you mention. > > * Patents. Not (allegedly) a problem everywhere yet. I suspect that the > various media companies hold patents over practically everything > else. > * Open Source Codecs. There are "free except for patents" codecs for > (most of?) the mp* codecs. WMV, Real, Quicktime (etc.) have not been > documented or reverse engineered (to the best of my knowledge). If > you're lucky, you'll get no-cost closed source codecs. Ok.. refresh my memory then.. On a fresh installed FC box, what codecs does it come with?? Ogg is definate. What else? -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 16:43:05 up 7:42, 6 users, load average: 0.83, 0.65, 0.48
