[Open-discuss] Hello - New to the list - Opening Questions

Hi,

My name is Alejandro Imass and I am working in a project for the
Venezuela Ministry of Culture. The project is to catalog some two
thousand "creators" in different areas such as Humanities and Arts,
Sports, Basic Sciences and such. Each "creator" or author will have the
opportunity to share things about his life and his works in several
media, including audio, video, photos and other documents of their works
the wish to share with the public.

For audio and video streaming we are evaluating different options and we
have come to the conclusion that perhaps the Helix Platform is probably
our best option. As a side note, we are obliged by presidential decree
to use free and open source software and standards and all of our portal
is built using free software tools such as the Debian OS, Catalyst and
PostgreSql. 

As stated above we have evaluated several options and we have decided to
stick with the ISO MPEG standards 3 and 4 for audio and video
respectively. We have also chosen the Real player as our standard
because of it's support for web page embedding and scripting
capabilities and it's support for the three main OSs used here in
Venezuela namely: Windows, Linux and Mac. The complete support for Linux
was really the primary reason.

For the server our first option was Icecast but because it cannot stream
mp4 we are now looking into Helix for both audio and video. The main
concern now are, of course, legal.

Our basic questions are: 

-Can we legally use the Helix server freely (in an ample context of the
word) to stream mp3 and mp4 audio and video for this NPO project?

-To serve/stream MP3 and/or MP4 content would we need to license and
special software component or patent licenses? if so, what would be the
procedures to so?

-Is there a possibility for NPOs to use the encoders for free? if so,
what type of agreements must be signed and what are the procedures?

-Are we asking in the right place? is there a specific contact or list
at Helix and/or Real to ask these questions?

We ask these questions because we have researched different places like
slashdot and others and some of the licensing issues are not very clear
to many people out there, even in recent threads of discussion.

Thanks beforehand for any help and direction we can get from the people
here, and sorry beforehand if these questions are OT to this list (if
such is the case).


Best regards,
Alejandro Imass













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