Dick/James: James Cornell asks: > Supported codecs out of the box? (Add in comments about legal rights > too if Sun's really concerned about it) > Sun's MP3 codec is bundled with OpenSolaris/Solaris, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. In previous Nevada builds, we did include the MP3 decoder plugin, but we recently discovered that there was an issue distributing it with GPL programs, so we removed it. Since you can get the plugin legally for free from Fluendo, this shouldn't be a huge hassle for people. See below for details... At the moment, we support the following audio codecs out-of-the-box: WAV, Ogg-Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, ulaw/alaw. We support the theora video codec. You can legally get the MP3 audio decoder plugin for free, and also other popular media codecs (such as Windows Media Audio-WMA and Video-WMV) from the Fluendo webstore. I highly encourage getting them if you want the best media experience on Solaris today. https://shop.fluendo.com/ I am working with Fluendo to provide MPEG2/MPEG4 plugins for Solaris, and hopefully they will be available in the next few months. Dick Hoogendijk says: >>> Steve Lau said: >>> We're planning to push Songbird 0.5 out on Monday or >>> Tuesday of next >>> week - probably easiest to wait for 0.5 final and >>> then make a build based off of that. >> Great! SongBird 0.5RC2 is simply awesome. Let's make >> this rock on OpenSolaris distros. > > And why is songbird so much better than rhythmbox that is provided by > gnome already on opensolaris? The biggest reason Songbird is better than rhythmbox is that it has better licensing. GPL'ed programs such as rhythmbox do not allow you to distribute with non-free code. With media, this is a serious issue since many popular formats (such as MP3, AC-3, etc.) are not free since they require paying licensing fees. This is described in the GStreamer FAQ: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/faq/html/chapter-legal.html Some GPL programs (such as totem) have a GPL licensing exception to specifically allow distributing with such media IP. You can see the totem exception as an example: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/totem/trunk/license_change?view=log Until all the GStreamer based programs have such an exception, Sun cannot ship a MP3 decoder plugin with GStreamer even though Sun does have a license from MPEG to ship MP3 decoder technology. In other words, this isn't an issue with MPEG, but an issue with the GPL license. I think our long-term goal is to fix Solaris so that it only ships with GStreamer based programs that contain this license exception, but this will likely take some time to coordinate. I know the rhythmbox and sound-juicer teams are working to add such exceptions so I hope this issue goes away sometime soon. If rhythmbox is unable to relicense their project, then we will likely switch to Songbird. If rhythmbox does fix their licensing, I think it would still be good to ship both and give users a choice in which media player they like to use. Brian
