Re: building multimedia applications

If building an application for a school district I would build it based 
upon GStreamer.

GStreamer has plugins grouped as -

good, bad, ugly

good is gstreamer plugins that don't violate known patents
bad and ugly do.

But by going with gstreamer and including the gstreamer-good plugins, 
the school district can optionally license the fluendo plugins if they 
need to be able to play patented codecs w/o violating patents.

On 10/16/2012 5:15 AM, LM wrote:
> I was thinking of the situation from the point of view of if a school
> system wanted to distribute applications or even an entire operating
> system within their district, what are known legal issues to avoid.
> I'm sure there are plenty of unknown issues that can't be taken into
> account, but somewhere there should be a list of what to be aware of
> with known problems in this area.
>
> Alice Wonder wrote:
>> the only thing
>> I could suggest is look at what Fedora distributes since they do attempt
>> to avoid distributing patent infringing multimedia software.
>
> I definitely intend to do that.
>
> I thought that because some of the strictly GNU based distributions
> were very careful about copyright issues, they might be a good source
> of information as well.  However, it looks like they mainly care about
> copyright issues, not patent issues.  (There seem to be quite a lot of
> those to look out for too.
> http://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines
> )  I also looked at some of the Debian builds, but they don't appear
> to be as strict as Red Hat.
>
> Matthew Burgess wrote:
>> That might
>> be another pragmatic approach to take; build your multimedia apps with
>> support for as many formats as possible so that you can decode anything
>> that you may stumble across.  When producing your own media, though, just
>> use a combination of VP8 for video & Ogg Vorbis for audio.
>
> I did run across an interesting estimate on when certain patents run
> out at this site:
> http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/
> Not sure how that correlates with software like smpeg which according
> to various sources is supposed to be patent unencumbered and handle
> MPEG-1:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPEG
>
> For audio, I usually prefer wave format compressed with flac.  That
> way, you have lossless compression.  There are other options like
> wavpack, but I haven't really tried them out.  There are also several
> comparison guides between lossless formats, such as this one:
> http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison
> I also use midi format a lot with abc2midi and timidity.  Freepats has
> some nice open licensed soundfonts.  With those tools, you can produce
> your own music from pd sheet music or your own compositions.
>
> I haven't had much of an opportunity to look into video, but I thought
> Dirac Schroedinger ( http://diracvideo.org/ ) might be a useful option
> as well.  It was developed by the BBC.  It would be really interesting
> to see a comparison between Dirac Schroedinger and VP8.
>
> If anyone runs across other sources of information or multimedia
> source tarballs that try to leave out possibly patent related code and
> emphasize open codecs, please post.
>
> Thanks.
>


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