[MPlayer-dev-eng] FFII software patent demo, politics, KiSS

[Jan Knutar]

On Monday 19 April 2004 22:23, Gabucino wrote:

> BTW using free codecs/formats won't help anyone, as it doesn't matter
> if you store the newest Kill Bill 2 DivX release in ASF or NUT,
> you'll be taken away and noone will care of the actual fileformat -
> only the content. (hint for biased people: that doesn't mean I'm
> against free stuff)

That's an entirely different matter, best dealt with authors of file 
sharing applications warning people about downloading copyrighted 
material, and those not using file sharing software for it are smart 
enough to know it already.
Despite the huge popularity of it, there are actually some people who 
might have uses for audio/video on computers for purposes other than 
getting around the painfully long wait for movies to appear in cinema 
and having to put up with the awful conditions therein :)

A few years ago, someone working for a company doing in-flight 
entertainment systems for airline companies, asked me if there was a 
legal way to play DVDs on Linux. Apart from one company vaguely 
mentioning a software DVD player for linux, there was none. 

While some people couldn't care less about the patent status and 
legalities of the software they use in their own homes, some people are 
forced to take this into consideration. 

Although a message warning about patent status borders on the limit to 
religious fanaticism alá RMS and Debian, I think it's a good idea to 
include one. It will raise awareness of this whole mess, and might gain 
a few more people to the demonstrations against sw patents, whether 
such an event be in EU or not. The message should however not be in the 
form of an obnoxious popup alá the fun and frequent huge "Your computer 
is too slow to play this" popups that used to pop up every few seconds 
with the GUI :) Not a "Press Y to accept you're using patented codecs 
and might be breaking the law" in order to proceed, either. GMPlayer 
needs a status bar or something, or perhaps an OSD info screen that 
could be toggled, which would display the video codec, audio codec, 
bitrate and such info...
As for the CLI, how about instead of:

Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4)

display this:

Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4) (possibly 
patent encumbered)

And a FAQ entry explaining what (possibly patent encumbered) might mean, 
in some countries.

A question, though, would (possibly patent encumbered) apply to divx.com 
codecs? heh...