Ken: > I'm following up on what Brian Cameron discussed on multimedia improvements. > This is something we discovered over at Blastwave: > "What digital music formats will Songbird play? > > With the QuickTime Playback and Window Media Playback add-ons installed, > Songbird can > play all the popular music formats including MPEG Audio (mpga), MPEG Layer 3 (mp3), > MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b), Ogg Vorbis, Speex, AAC, > WMA, WMADRM, FLAC, and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR. If you're a developer, > teach Songbird how to play your favorite format!"
Note that Sun does not have permission to distribute code that plays many of these formats that include IP (Intellectual Property) such as MPEG, AAC, QuickTime, WindowsMedia, etc. To include Songbird in any Solaris/OpenSolaris distro it would need to be built without support for these formats. It would be okay if end-users could purchase licensed plugins that would enable formats with Songbird. For example, Fluendo sells a WindowsMedia GStreamer plugin for Solaris. Perhaps Songbird could make use of such legally purchased IP plugin add-ons. If SongBird doesn't use GStreamer directly, then perhaps it could be enhanced to work with certain GStreamer plugins that users have legally purchased and installed on their computer. Perhaps a GStreamer->SongBird bridge would help for this sort of thing? Sun does have a license to ship MPEG1 (levels 1-3) aka MP3 audio (decoding only). So for Solaris builds, we would probably want to built it with MP3 audio decoding support turned on. Hopefully this is easily configurable. > So, we were able to fix a bug during firefox 2.0.0.9 and seamonkey 1.1.6 > builds. I just > looked at xulrunner 1.8.1.3 and SongBird 0.3... is this good enough to port to OpenSolaris? Brian
