MPEG-1 read support

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 18:19:54 UTC 2009


2009/3/17 Bryn M. Reeves <bmr at redhat.com>:
> 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.
>

Well, mpeg1 might not be a high priority by itself, but it would be
useful to be able to pull in codecs as patents expire.

-- 
imalone




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