[Fedora-legal-list] Reasons for not including MPlayer in main repository?

[Stefan Parviainen]

Hi all,

I have an application that I would like to package, but it has a
dependency on mplayer. It would, therefore, be nice to get a version of
mplayer into the Fedora repositories.

I know the mplayer project has had some legal difficulties
regarding the license previously, but these seem to have been solved
some time ago (e.g. Debian includes a version on mplayer). Currently the
project is released under GPLv2.

The main issue nowadays is probably patents. Apparently support for some
formats can not be included without breaking some patents. Does anyone
on this list have an idea which formats are problematic from the point
of view of the Fedora project? Would removing support for these formats
make it possible to include a stripped version of mplayer in the Fedora
repositories? MPlayer is a fairly well known piece of software, has this
problem been discussed somewhere before?

-- 
Stefan Parviainen