[MPlayer-users] ASF patenting ?

[Kylus]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 03:21:24PM +0200, Julien WAJSBERG [flash at minet.net] wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> It says particularly that transcoding from ASF to another format is
> forbidden (and mencoder can do that).

I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. IIRC the problem that M$ had with
Virtualdub was that the author had reverse engineered the ASF format to do
the transcoding and M$ claims it owns that particular file format (go
figure..). If I'm not mistaken mplayer doesn't reverse engineer the ASF
format, but uses native M$ dll's to decode the format so it should be
'legal' to transcode from ASF to something else without too much of a
hassle. I think if M$ had a problem with mplayer, we'd have heard
rumblings from Redmond by now over it. Or maybe they're too busy fitting
their Linux World Expo people with kevlar right now ;) 

Of course this issue is very old so I might be mistaken about the exact
dispute, so don't quote me, but that's my point of view.

> What do you think ?

I think M$ sucks, but that's a discussion for another place ;) MPlayer
rules.

Patrick