On Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:18:37 +0000, Cinder Roxley wrote:

>> Like I already wrote earlier, the way to go is to use the gstreamer SDK 
>> for Windows and get a gstreamer plugin compiled for the latter. 
>
> With all due respect, gstreamer is a major pain to build on Windows

It's a pain to build under Linux too :-D  But CEF is even more painful
to build, so...

Plus that "pain" is to go through only once and for all, to build the
pre-built package that will then be used to build all the viewers
(painlessly).

> and runs afoul of dozens of patents and licenses. It’s fine if you’re
> building from source for linux, but it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen for
> commercial software if you want to play any “standard” media format like
> h264 or mp3.

Please, elaborate and give pointers. There are dozens (and probably closer
to dozens of dozens) of Linux and *BSD distributions (i.e. binary, ready
to run OS+software, commercial or not) providing and using gstreamer, and
I never heard about any lawsuite related to this fact...

> Something like libvlc might work if you want a cross platform library
> (but again, there are per-install royalties to use h264 so you’d still
> be screwed on mp4.)

Software patents are a US thingy... I'm glad the UE rejected them. MP4,
H264 and anything involving patented protocols and formats are free to
play in the whole world, but in the US... *If* such patents prevent to
provide a full set of CODECs, I guess LL would have to restrict their
number in their pre-built library package (gstreamer is not monolithic,
it is fully modular), but TPV developers outside the US won't have to
bother with such restsictions...

> Platform-specific plugins could take advantage of the OS’s media playback
> capabilities, without license and patent headaches.

Perhaps for Windows. But again, Linux don't have any patent for playing
media and no lawsuite whatsoever prevent Linux distros to be distributed
(including in the US)... I'm still extremely doubtful about such patent
issues for software that are only meant to *play* *existing* media files
(i.e. media files you acquired legally and already paid any patent for).

Henri.
_______________________________________________
Policies and (un)subscribe information available here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev
Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges

Reply via email to