History
Do you remember, Eric Raymond (ESR), “the cathedral and the bazaar” writer, mailed all of us on his departure of Fedora? I will not comment on the man and the hello-look-I-am-here-and-everyone-should-do-the-same and I-post-my-life-on-all-mailing-list-attitudes, because it is boring.
This was last week, initial announcement and there were a lot of answers, but I liked the Alan Cox answer the most.
Alan Cox answer:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 03:03:50AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
- Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with
any attitude other than blank denial.
That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing
(a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term
“open source” also did the decent thing and died out with you.
I love that guy.
Proprietary multimedia format is a shame and we should fight against them. Moreover, there is not a lot of format that a player like VLC media player can not read. There are a few meaningless, that no-one cares about and there is RealVideo. WMV-9/VC-1/H.264/MPEG-*/Theora/Dirac/mp3/ogg and a lot of others are readable with VLC. Those includes the new HD-Disks and HD-TV formats, so please don’t spread FUD around.
And this without any W32Codecs or any dll parsing !
Real Video
So, yes, real video are not readable; DRM files, and Indeo 4/5 are not readable either. But that is it for the main Video formats.
Moreover, because of this strategy (refusing to deliver the specs of RV40 and RV50), real has lost a lot of marketshares! Remember a few years ago ? You couldn’t see any movie on the web or hear any music streaming without RealVideo support. For me, Real had technological advance that they lost because they wanted to stay more than proprietary…
Mplayer and MPC can read them, but Mplayer uses the Real dlls, which is not a so good idea, IMHO and may pervert their own licence. :D