[MPlayer-users] (another) dvdvideosoft GPL violation?

[Gary Steele]

Dear Mplayer users/developers,

This mail is to report what I think may be a GPL violation by
dvdvideosoft. I recently downloaded thier "Flip and Rotate" software
(hoping it might be able to rotate my video without re-encoding and
while preserving the flv container, which it didn't in the end):

http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/

As you can see at the bottom of this page, "their" software has won
many awards.

The Flip and Rotate software outputs an AVI file, and is remarkably
flexible about it's input format. However, I when I checked the
rotated clip with mplayer, I found the following:

Clip info:
 Software: MEncoder Sherpya-SVN-r30369-4.2.5

It appears that they are using mencoder for their rotate software, but
unfortunately, this fact is not mentioned anywhere on their website,
nor do they include a copy of the GPL. A similar violation of other
parts of their "video suite" with ffmpeg code was recently reported:

http://lscube.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-issues/2010-January/008849.html

To their credit, the software is "Free" (they do not charge money to
download it, although they do encourage donations). Also, they seem to
have made a nice GUI package around the mplayer/ffmpeg functionality,
which is handy for windows users (I would have just used the mencoder
command line if I had known this, of course...). Unfortunately, their
software also lies near the edge of "spyware" or "malware", as they
prompt you to install their web browser toolbars during installation,
as well as each time you close the software. (at least they ask?)

I wasn't sure if this was the right mailing list to report license
violations: I hope this message reaches the right people.

Cheers,
Gary