Media Files Licensing Query (eg: avi/mp3/mpg/divx)

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 17:45 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > I'm just curious regarding the licenses of the media files such as
> > avi/mpg/mpeg2/mp3/wmv/mov/divx/ etc..etc.
> > 
> > I know that mp3 definately needs licensing from fraunhoffer if anyone
> > wants to use/sell a product commercially. (which is why it's not
> > included in Fedora)
> > 
> > Is there any others?? I know for sure ogg is GPL.
> 
> Actually, Ogg (which includes FLAC: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/) is
> mostly BSD-style: http://old.lwn.net/2001/0301/
> http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html
> 
> .avi is a container format (not too dissimilar to Ogg, come to that). 
> It's status depends on the encoding being used. I *think* the same is
> true for .wav.
> 
> There are three basic problems with the others you mention.
> 
>  * Patents. Not (allegedly) a problem everywhere yet. I suspect that the
>    various media companies hold patents over practically everything
>    else.

>  * Open Source Codecs. There are "free except for patents" codecs for
>    (most of?) the mp* codecs. WMV, Real, Quicktime (etc.) have not been
>    documented or reverse engineered (to the best of my knowledge). If
>    you're lucky, you'll get no-cost closed source codecs.


Ok.. refresh my memory then.. On a fresh installed FC box, what codecs
does it come with?? Ogg is definate. What else?


-- 
Ow Mun Heng
Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 
98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! 
Neuromancer 16:43:05 up 7:42, 6 users, load average: 0.83, 0.65, 0.48