[MPlayer-dev-eng] Any additional features for inclusion in rc3 RPMs?

[Joey Parrish]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 12:29:37PM -0500, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > dunno. afaik libgif is illegal, and libungif is useless.
> LOL! Worrying about gif when we encode mp3, mpeg4, etc. seems sort of
> silly. Might as well at least link it in, then the user can pick
> libgif or libungif depending on which they prefer.

libgif and libungif are binary compatible in most distros.
Gif decoding is legal always, and gif encoding is only illegal when
compressed.  Since the compression is done by another library, and
it's the user who installs that library (binary compatible with the
uncompressed version) it's not MPlayer's liability.  Plus, the US
Patents on LZW compression held by Unisys and IBM both run out in
June of 2003.  The legality of gif is rapidly becoming a non-issue.

> Also, gif support is nice for being able to watch animated gifs, and
> libungif can decode any gif file.

Speaking of which, I don't expect to get it accepted before 0.90, but
I'm still playing with making MPlayer a gif decoder.  I have some
problems I can't figure out, but I'll start a new thread for that.

--Joey