Mario: > Voted MPlayer, since multimedia's important to regular users. Would have > been happier if there were a completish set of gstreamer codecs as > option. To get things like Songbird, Totem and its Mozilla plugin > working out of the box with most stuff.
MPlayer has many issues that will probably prevent it from being accepted into Solaris. Issues include: - MPlayer is released under the GPL license. You can not distribute MPlayer with any non-GPL compatible code, which would include any encumbered media codecs, or else you violate the terms of the GPL. End-users can build things like MPlayer and FFMpeg themselves without violating the GPL, but it can not be distributed with the OS. - MPlayer uses FFMpeg, which includes a lot of codecs that require license to distribute. It could be added to Solaris if we disabled all the codecs that Sun doesn't have license to distribute. This would be a fair bit of work, and is probably not worth the effort. FFMpeg would be pretty useless with these formats removed. You would not be able to, for example, play DVD's with it. The company Fluendo sells plugins that allow Solaris to legally play many non-free media formats, such as Windows Media and MP3 audio (their MP3 audio plugin is free). They are also reasonably priced, I think. http://shop.fluendo.com/ A better free software option for DVD support is to use the program Elisa. It uses GStreamer plugins, and has licensing terms which allow it to be linked with non-GPL compatible GStreamer plugins, and distributed that way. http://elisa.fluendo.com/ There are spec-files for building Elisa in spec-files-extra. If you have built the GStreamer plugins which allow DVD playback, then it will play DVD's. In fact, I understand that Fluendo plans to start selling a legally licensed DVD player based on Elisa sometime later this year. For this to work on Solaris, Fluendo will also need to provide the MPEG2 and AC-3 codecs for Solaris. They currently provide licensed plugins for Linux, but not Solaris. I am currently working with them to address this, and hopefully they will have these plugins (as well as MPEG4) available for Solaris sometime before they release their DVD player. Elisa, totem, rhythmbox, and Songbird are the only free media players (that I know of) with licensing terms that are friendly to using non-free, but popular, media codecs such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MP3 audio, Windows Media, etc. If you like using such non-free media formats, then I recommend using free software that has compatible licensing. I am working with the sound-juicer team to encourage them to also consider relicensing under a similar license. Brian
