Screensaver takes too much time to fade-out...

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2011-12-17 at 00:01 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Thursday 15 December 2011 16:36:43 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Thu, 2011-12-15 at 12:29 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
> > > I was under the impression that codecs were executables and as such, OS
> > > specific.  I presume that a Windows codec/trojan could run under wine if
> > > you have it installed, but would it be able to do any damage?  Enquiring
> > > minds want to *KNOW!*
> > 
> > They're usually libraries and may be cross-platform, e.g. the mplayer
> > non-free codecs are designed for Windows but work in Linux as well.
> 
> That's not quite precisely true, those codecs do *not* work in Linux. Rather, 
> the mplayer devs have reverse-engineered the various library calls in the 
> codec DLL's, and are able to provide a simulated environment to make the 
> number-crunching routines of various codecs work as in Windows (think virtual 
> machine environment).
> 
> So the Windows codec DLL's used by mplayer are executed in a sandboxed 
> environment and mplayer is just reading off the results of the calculations. 
> There are no system calls available, no filesystem access, no network 
> availability, no nothing. A real coding/decoding routine shouldn't need any of 
> those, so mplayer doesn't even try to provide them. It's just using those 
> "executables" as closed-source library routines, in contrast to the executable 
> processes. Or put more simply --- there is a difference between an executable 
> and an executable... ;-)
> 
> Those DLL's don't even work under Windows, without the support of an external 
> parent process calling them, like mplayer. So those are perfectly safe, as 
> long as the parent process is using them for the intended purpose only.

OK, that's worth knowing.

poc