[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [PATCH] Use libunrar when available (2nd try)

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 12:07:34AM +0800, Zuxy Meng wrote:
> 2006/6/22, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx>:
> >I agree that it violates the GPL regardless of whather you use dlopen
> >or -lunrar... Why do people keep insisting on this useless rar support
> >anyway?
> 
> You may ask the guy who firstly import libunique rather than
> libz/libbz2 into mplayer, truth is that RARed vobsubs are common, so
> far as I know.
> 
> BTW I don't like RAR either, as I don't like rm format, but others
> like them and use them to encode movies so I don't regard supporting
> them as useless.

The difference is that it's easy to unrar your vobsubs with an
external program before playing the movie. It's not easy to convert
your .rm files... As long as rar is nonfree and no one makes a free
decompressor, I see no reason for us to make it excessively easy to
play rar vobsubs in-place, especially when it requires infringing the
GPL on certain code we've imported even more than we're already doing.
If you really want rar support, why not write us a small, clean, free
rar extractor library?

Rich