[MPlayer-dev-eng] matroska container sold to IBM

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Hi all,

i have some great news to spread today, and i am indeed extremely happy 
that i have the honour of doing so :

The matroska project, including all source code and the main 
specification, by signed contract dated 31st March 2003, was sold to the 
International Bussiness Machine Corporation ( IBM ), New Orchard Road, 
Armonk, NY 10504, USA. . My thanks goes to Dan 'Metaboy' Marlin from the 
Corecodec team for making the initial contact, Dan, without you this 
would have not been possible.

IBM will convert the matroska project and all libraries into a closed 
source format, but make the binaries of the library publically available 
for non-commercial usage, together with an API to be able to read/write 
matroska files from all applications on different OSes. An  arrangement 
was made with all active developers to make it possible to allow a 
changing of the existing GPL/QPL dual licensing system.

After months of hard negotiations there can be no doubt that one of the 
first commercial license takers of matroska will be the Matsushita 
Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, chosing matroska as their main container 
format for an upcoming proprietary blue laser DVD standard to be 
released by Panasonic and some of their licensees on the new standard, 
in an attempt to avoid the domination of the Windows Media Video 9 (TM) 
standard from Micorosoft (R)  for next generations HDTV video. Panasonic 
already announced they will use a wavelet based video codec called WARP, 
created by the IBM video compression department around the well known 
codec expert Mr. Toby Hudon ( performing wavelet on 512 consecutive 
frames, and on every frame itself ), and to use the musepack audio 
compression format ( MPC ) for audio.

I sincerely hope that all of you will see the big advantage for the 
opensource audio and video community in undertaking this step, as from 
now on there will be one new standard a/v container, in possession of 
one of the biggest computer companies of the world, but fully available 
for the community.

Best regards from Hawaii

Christian
http://www.matroska.org