MPEG-1 read support

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 14:48 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> > Please remember Wackipedia is often simply the collected urban
> > legends, misunderstandings and general cluelessness of its contributors.
> > What Wackipedia has to say and what the actual situation (reviewed by
> > people competent to give legal opinions) is are often quite different.
> 
> Well, the Wikipedia article gives references claiming the last relevant
> patent expired in 2003. So the OP's question sounds legitimate to me, and
> this is probably worth a review by RH Legal.

The problem is a bit deeper than that I believe. Even though some parts
of  the standards are no longer covered by outstanding patents I'm not
aware of implementations that neatly separate things out so that you can
easily pick the patent-encumbered from the non-patent-encumbered.

For e.g., I'm not aware of a widely used MPEG audio implementation that
implements only layers 1 and 2 (patents expired) but not layer 3
(patents outstanding) (yes, I know about tooLAME but it is nothing like
as widely used as equivalents that include layer 3 support).

Given the amount of work it could take to re-organise everything around
this and the relatively limited amount of media most users will
encounter that is encoded in straight mpeg1-video with mpeg1 layer-1/2
audio I'm not sure the effort is justified.

Regards,
Bryn.