Brian Cameron wrote: > 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. >
Songbird uses GStreamer - so it would just use whatever GStreamer plugins Sun chooses to ship with its distribution of OpenSolaris. Users can buy plugins, or build their own, or find other places to get binary plugins to drop in to add support to Songbird. cheers, steve -- stephen lau | stevel at opensolaris.org | www.whacked.net
