[MPlayer-users] "Convert your AVI/VOB/FooBar to DivX4 + VBR MP3" ????

[Arpi]

Hi,

> I though that you, open source developers, will understand things like this.
> But no. I am very disappointed.
your problem...

> Imagine how it would be if SourceForge suddenly close the CVS and turned
> every open source project into their own commercial product!
hehe :) rotfl.
you are who don't understand it, not us.

> How would you feel then? Will you still not care that all the code you 
> wrote is suddenly gone?
it can't. divx4 never gone suddenly.

now, the story, from my viewpoint.
note, that i know well people working on divx4 and opendivx.
so. there were a company, named project mayo, who decided to open the source
of their codec. 
1. they never did it GPL or so, they had own sepcial license,
allowing them to turn it back to closed. so independent people working on it
knew this option.
2. they didn't accepted patches from independent people. i also did lots of
speedup optimization and other bugfixes, they exists only in our fork in
mplayer cvs.
3. even GPL allows to authors to change license, even to closed source, if
_all_ the authors agree. as a good example: Eugene K. wasn't member of project
mayo, but he is employee of it since closing the project.
4. they had the reason to close the source: 1. a rival company started to steal
their code...  2. divx 3 compatibility not alowed in open source.
(don't ask details, i don't know more about this)
5. opendivx still exists, and still open for people who worked on it and
wants it. just think that projectmayo guys stopped opendivx development, and
writting a new codec (divx4), reusing _their_own_ old code from opendivx.

i can't see what is wrong with it.

or, do you know someone, who sent patches to opendivx, it was accepted, and
now it's stolen as it became closed source without his permission?

i've talked a lot about open/close sourcing of code with Eugene, and i'm
sure they carefully checked each line of the source for license.
it caused some problems, too for example with the idct code.

> And BTW, you'll loose *a lot of quality* by transcoding things!
everyone know it. btw speak about re-encoding, not transcoding.
real transcoding means code set and language change, and possible
without any quality loss. it's possible to convert between different
mpeg versions just changing huffman tables but keeping all DCT and MC
values. it is called transcoding. of course it's limited, and won't
change file size a lot (max few % depending on difference of coding).
and of course mencoder doesn't do transcoding, it does encoding and
optional decoding and optinally uses other (of course lossy) filters.

> The Vorbis guys have been telling time over time that transcoding is a 
> bad thing to do.
> Don't tell me you don't care about audio/video quality either...
we care.
btw, if you say transcoding is bad, then i may think that you only
have uncompressed avi's and .wav files on your disk, and yo udelete
everything other?


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
mailto:arpi at thot.banki.hu
http://esp-team.scene.hu