[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer for use in a consumer device?

[Diego Biurrun]

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Stewart Apelzin schrieb:
> I'm Stew Apelzin, a Project Manager at Liberate Technologies 
> (http://www.liberate.com).  Liberate develops software for operating and 
> navigating  television-related products.

I am Diego Biurrun, a documentation maintainer of the MPlayer project.

> I am working with a partner on a project where our software would be 
> embedded in a LINUX based, multi-function device.  One function of the 
> device is the playing of DVDs.  We are exploring how to do DVD 
> navigation.   MPlayer looks like a good fit for what we are trying to 
> accomplish.

Great news.  MPlayer is good at DVD playback, but DVD navigation is 
currently not one of its strong points.  We would, however, very much 
appreciate your cooperation on this issue ;-)  It's just a matter of 
synchronising MPlayer to the latest version of the Linux DVD navigation 
software.  It's not a lot of work, just something that nobody has found 
the time to do yet.

MPlayer can also do TV recording and output, like some of the products 
described on your web page.  It's also the basis of two personal video 
recorders, freevo and LinDVR:

http://www.freevo.org
http://linvdr.org/

 > The code is listed as GPL, is there a way that we can adapt
> it for commercial use?

Who says you cannot adapt MPlayer (or any other GPL program) for 
commercial use?  That's Microsoft propaganda and very far away from the 
truth.  Have you read the GPL?  Here it is:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

There is also a frequently asked questions page that should directly 
answer any further questions you might have:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

In short: You can use MPlayer for any purpose, but if you redistribute 
it you have to do so under the GPL and make the source code available. 
This does not apply to any other programs you write, of course, only to 
MPlayer.

If you wish to distribute it as closed source, you will have problems. 
Since numerous people have contributed to MPlayer, there are many 
copyright holders that would have to agree to sell you MPlayer under a 
different license.  But why would you want to do this in the first 
place?  We would love to cooperate with you in merging any modifications 
you make into the official MPlayer version.  If you have specific needs 
I'm sure you can contract one of the developers to do (some of) the work 
for you.  We have much to offer you.  There is no video player on this 
planet that can match MPlayer's performance, portability, feature set 
and support for video formats, not free nor commercial, not on Linux or 
Windows or MacOS.  Think about it and please consider joining the community.

 > Also, have you done any work toward an embedded
> solution that would fit in a small memory footprint?

Depends on what you call an embedded solution.  MPlayer works on the 
Zaurus PDA with a StrongARM CPU.  There may be other applications that I 
am not aware of.

http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=353
http://kirk.math.twsu.edu/family/james/mplayer.html

I hope this helped you, feel free to contact me if you have further 
questions.

Diego Biurrun

P.S.: We would all really appreciate if you could teach your Outlook 
Express not to send HTML mail by default, at least not to mailing lists. 
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