mplayer vs. xine

[Peter Backlund]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Peter Backlund <peter.backlund at home.se>:
> 
>>I believe the philosophy of livna is to only carry things that are 
>>re-distributable, with regards to the author of the software. That 
>>excludes RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Java, Win32 codec dlls etc.
> 
> 
> These are all redistributable in some form or other.  Some have technical
> restrictions on repackaging, but that's not quite the same thing as
> being locked up entirely.

If this is correct, it is certainly good news. However, I based my claim 
on the following:

1. I actually emailed Adobe on behalf of the Fedora Project, asking for 
permission to repackage and redistribute Acrobat Reader. They declined.

2. I also contacted Real, but they never answered (at least not yet, 4 
months later. I'm not holding my breath). They also make you fill in a 
form when downloading the player, so it seems unlikely that they would 
be OK with redistribution.

The form:
http://forms.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html

The Helix project looks promising, and my impressions from skimming the 
FAQ is that it will eventually be possible to redistribute a version of 
the player without RealAudio/RealVideo.

Release Notes for Milestone 2 (look under Licensing)

https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/draft/MS2ReleaseNotes.html

It would be nice if the Fedora community could supply a "helixplayer" 
package (without RA/RV support), and work with Real to make them supply 
an add-on rpm with RA/RV support (same way as xmms/xmms-mp3 works now).

3. The JPackage project do not supply binaries of Sun's JDK/JRE (or any 
other JRE for that matter), but only src.rpm version, where you download 
the JDK/JRE and rebuild the binary rpm yourself. I simply assume that 
they have looked into the distribution situation quite carefully.

4. About the codecs, I find it _very_ hard to believe that Microsoft for 
one would be OK with redistributing Windows Media binary dlls?

That said, if you know for sure that any of these are in fact 
redistributable, we should absolutley do that.

/Peter