[MPlayer-users] ASF patenting ?

[Arpi]

Hi,

> > [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
yes

> 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
no
dlls are codecs, the format is reverse engineered.

to get .asf/.wma/.wmv files work, you have 2 choices:
1. use the reverse engineered file format doc (by vdub and avifile authors)
2. use the doc recently released by M$, with a license which strictly
disallow use in any opensource/free project...

no one is legal, but at least the avifile guys found a legal hole which
more-or-less legalize their work

> '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
probably they won't like it, but as mplayer doesn't run on windows yet, they
don't care. as soon as win32 port is done, we may get conflict with m$,
it's the no.1 reason i'm against win32 port...


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer, the Movie Player for Linux - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu