Hi Damien, > Patents are not on the code, they are on the technics, so it is certainly not > legal, > at least in the US. In Europe, it is still a bit "vague". Fortunately, the EU-parliament rejected the proposal for computer implemented inventions in July 2005. That happened after long struggle and intense lobbying by civil liberty groups such as e.g the http://www.ffii.org/ To keep our freedom, we have to use it to show that it is valuable :-) Otherwise we will loose it sooner or later.
The codec issue is a rather big one when it comes to videoconferencing, since 1- Image quality H.261 is inferior to what the usual suspects the e.g. Messengers have to offer. 2- most SIP User Agents like e.g. xten, wengophone or the Java sip-communicatior don't support H.261 anymore - so you can't issue a video call from/to these clients using Gnomemeeting - the same goes for hardware phones / conference systems 3- as someone on this mailing list mentioned and I was told by a person related to deaf/hearing impaired people: it's hard to "talk" in sign language over it (but this is actually a nice application for video telephony.) > However, there is a licensing problem. x264 is GPL, and OPAL/OPENH323 ... > x264 should add an exception clause for OpenH323/OPAL in their license. Well, ffmpeg is LGPL which means that you can link it as a library. Check out ther legal pages http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/legal.php Having compiled ffmpeg a while ago, I remember, that there is a "GPL" compile option which means, that it disables all codecs which are non LGPL compatiple. I wonder what's the case with H.263 (which would be a quantum leap to have it- though it's not 264) I also wonder how the Wengo guys and java sip-communicator folks solved their legal problems concerning 263. (these are open source projects as well - some GPL) Another idea, which would solve point 1 and 3 but not 2 above: use Theora. Check this out: http://www.tipic.com/tipicim - it's an open source Video Jabber messenger using Theora as video codec. Perhaps opal/Gnomemeeting could benefit. This would do to video what Speex did for audio - a decent free codec. Greetings Conrad > -- > _ Damien Sandras > (o- > // GnomeMeeting: http://www.gnomemeeting.org/ > v_/_ FOSDEM 2006 : http://www.fosdem.org > SIP Phone : sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > _______________________________________________ > GnomeMeeting-list mailing list > GnomeMeeting-list@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnomemeeting-list > > _______________________________________________ GnomeMeeting-list mailing list GnomeMeeting-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnomemeeting-list
