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

Answers below in blue.

Scott Nelson

Dir Bus Dev

At 07:43 AM 11/15/2006, Alejandro Imass wrote:

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?
Real's commercial server
product called the Helix Server can stream mp3 and mp4. You can get a
free trial copy to test it here.
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/free_trial.html
-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?
Not from us, you just
need the server. You can check with these two organizations about their
requirements:

MP3 -
http://www.mp3licensing.com/

MP4 -
http://www.mpegla.com/index1.cfm
-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?
The RealProducer Basic is
free already, see the website above.

The Real Producer Plus has a small fee and you need more than just the
software.
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/digital.html

you would need to talk to our sales organization about a
donation.

-Are we asking in the
right place? is there a specific contact or list

at Helix and/or Real to ask these
questions?
You asked on a good place.
Click the contact sales button on the webpages to acquire our commercial
encoders and Helix Servers if the free ones do not do all that you need.
To download the players for popular OS go to
http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=rnwk

If you want to help develop the open source Helix Player for Linux go to
this website in the Helix Community.
https://player.helixcommunity.org/
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.
I hope this helps.

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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Scott Nelson

Dir. Bus. Dev. Helix

www.helixcommunity.org Office 925 838-5536 Mobile 925 890-5306

"The
overall best codec was RealNetworks RealVideo." StreamingMedia.com article by
Jan
Ozer 3/22/06

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