On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 04:34:41PM +0200, A Mennucc wrote: > mplayer 1.0pre7 is ready and packaged at > http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer/sarge > > a. > > ps: still no news from ftpmasters... hope they at least will try to read > http://people.debian.org/~mjr/mplayer.html
Right, so as an mplayer user and having an interest in its inclusion, I took a look. Note that I'm a member of the FTP team, and occasionally do NEW processing, but the large majority of it has been done by Joerg Jaspert. First thing I noticed was that it's about 700.000 lines of sourse code. That's a lot. Of the potential issues, I'll give you my own, personal opinion, which might or might not be shared by all ftp-masters. - Copyright: I believe consensus is that this case is settled, thanks to the great work by the numerous people involved - Packaging stuff: Of course there are always nitpicks, but IMHO those are not a consideration for whether or not to accept the package, not in the last place because of the long time it's already in the queue. Particular issues that itch the ftp-master that would approve the package are IMHO best done with filing a bug after accepting, I didn't see any serious issues in any case. - Patents: The big issue with mplayer a.t.m. I'm myself not very following the patent stuff, but as far as I understood, certain patents hold by the MPEG organisation, esp. those w.r.t. encoding of MPEG data streams, are actively being enforced, (again afaik) in the United States in particular. See [1] for more information of what I believe is relevant here. Unfortunately, links there mostly either shine in unavailability (404 etc) or utter vagueness and non-information (I couldn't find any bit of useful patenting information at [2], for example). The FFII had more useful information at [3]. All this seems to concentrate on MPEG-related *encoding* though, and not to decoding. Moreover, Debian contains plenty of MPEG-related decoding software, and the FTP-master policy at least w.r.t. audio MPEG decoding has always been to not let supposed patents in this area stand in the way of distributing this software, on the basis that it seems to be an unenforceable patent, or at least, it isn't enforced (and giving in to any patent would mean Debian could not distribute anything). I see no reason why MPEG videa decoding would be different in this respect, again, to the best of my knowledge. So, adding these two tentative[4] conclusions together, it seems likely that if mplayer were demonstrated with reasonable certainty to be free of MPEG-encoding code, it would be acceptable for inclusion in main as far as the FTP-masters are concerned (note: We're not (yet?) saying it's *required* to strip MPEG encoding stuff, but in my personal opinion, it seems likely that this is what it'll turn out to be. Don't take my words on too much value though, maybe stripping this won't be required after all, but in any case, if it isn't there, we don't need to think/discuss about it -- reinclusion of the encoding stuff can then later separately be discussed). I must mention one big 'but' though: as mentioned above, patent stuff isn't my expertise, and I could easily have missed a patent (or other) issue. MPlayer is definitely a hairy subject, unfortunately, and that's the reason for the delay in processing it[5], it requires careful research and reasonable deal of attention to boring patent stuff. I hope this helps, --Jeroen [1] http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/starting-points.html#ipr [2] http://www.licensing.philips.com/information/mpeg/ [3] http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/mpeg/index.en.html [4] Barring mistakes in my reasoning [5] The 'suboptimal' communication has other reasons that will no doubt be talked about in the next FTP-master flame[6], so I'm not inclined to comment on that [6] I've not yet been informed about its ETA -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar [EMAIL PROTECTED] (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
