I'm not trying to add fuel to the fire here, but this may be a bit inciteful...
The dependency of mplayer is put in by whomever is maintaining the packages that you're using. Most likely this person decided that having mplayer would be nice, so that you could play video files and DVDs that MythTV could not. Without mplayer or xine, or some other media player, MythVideo and MythDVD won't do a whole lot. If you really want to get anal, MythTV at the moment is likely in violation of licensing/patents for MPEG-2 (ffmpeg, which I believe is in the source tree), and it uses LAME (MP3) (though I think it can be disabled) and can optionally use libmpeg2 (again, MPEG-2). I don't know what the royalty rates on MPEG-2 are, but MP3 is $0.75 (U.S.?) per decoder (from http://www.mp3licensing.com) - hence why Red Hat doesn't enable MP3 playback in Fedora Core (and even RH9, I think). Additionally, in the United States, DVD playback under Linux is a violation of the DMCA (as there is only one licensed DVD playback software, and I don't think that any of us are using it), although it has been held to be legal elsewhere. If you want to minimize the risk, then the best that you can do is build MythTV from source code, which will require only the MythTV source code, and (possibly) the LAME MP3 encoder. In terms of picking and choosing, I can't speak for the developers here... But, given that MPEG-2 and MP3 were considered necessities, they were allowed in. They are *officially* part of MythTV (like MythWeb, MythDVD, MythWeather, etc.) and are thus supported. However, Torrentocracy is *NOT* an official plugin, and therefore Isaac doesn't want to be fielding questions about it. Also, those of us who are using atrpms for our MythTV RPMs are getting them out of the country as well. Most of the apt-repositories that contain mplayer and lame are located outside of the United States. Darn U.S. and their crazy laws again. (For the record, I am a Canadian citizen, but a U.S. resident). -- Joe --- Adam Prentice <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I see what you're saying. I was under the > impression that mythtv REQUIRED > mplayer in order to work. I wasn't able to install > it without the mplayer > dependancy. > > Also, in my original message a few weeks ago, all I > asked was if anyone's > been able to get torrentocracy to work. I didn't > ask for mythtv.org to > distribute it...just if anyone in the community has > any experience with the > plugin. > > If mplayer or the questionable codecs are not > required in order to make > mythtv work, I'd love to know how to get it set up > as such. The way I > install it now is through urpmi mythtv-suite. > Should I be doing it another > way? > > - Adam > > > > I'm new to linux, and over the past few weeks > while trying to get a > mythtv > > box set up I've learned about mplayer and how it's > in the PLF. Seems > like > > this community picks and chooses which > controversial programs or plugins > are > > allowed to be used and discussed. Why is this? > > >mplayer is not created nor supplied by the MythTV > folks. It may *be* > >of questionable legality, but such questions attach > directly to the end > >user, who may be using codecs supplied under > overly-restrictive > >licenses with it. > > > >> From what I can tell, torrentocracy is not > illegal, even in the United > >> States. And...mplayer seems like it may break > more IP laws than > >> torrentocracy...or at least there's enough of a > possibility that it's not > >> included in the Mandrake distribution. I don't > know about other linux > >> distributions, but those of us who use Mandrake > are forced to get their > >> software from another country in order to make > mythtv work. Maybe I'm > wrong > >> about mplayer, like I said....I'm new to linux. > > > >In the case of broadcatching plugins, they actually > are *plugins*, at > >least in some cases, and the issue is whether > MythTV.org should > >distribute them (at least, that's the issue as *I* > understand it). > > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > mythtv-users@mythtv.org > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com
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