From kde-core-devel Tue Oct 08 08:52:26 2013 From: Harald Sitter Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 08:52:26 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: Fwd: looking for phonon gstreamer maintainer Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=138122239622854 On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote= : > On 04 Oct, Daniel Vr=C3=A1til wrote : >> in Fedora we have a big interest in keeping phonon-gstreamer alive, name= ly >> because we can't ship phonon-vlc due to legal issues (you know, US compa= ny, >> software patents and what not...) and our users would not probably be ve= ry > > This is a bit untrue, tbh and at the limit of FUD. > > libVLC and libVLCcore are not more patent-encumbered than > gstreamer-core. > > VLC, phonon-VLC and libVLC are based on modules loaded at runtime, like > gstreamer, QT, DShow and other multimedia frameworks (a contrario from > all-included players like mplayer) > Shipping a version without problematic modules is very doable and has > already been done. FWIW rdieter and j-b were able to clear up the confusion on IRC and apparently there now are plans to get vlc-without-patent-plugins into Fedora \o/ For anyone who is interested... libvlc* use $LIB/vlc/plugins/*/*.so to actually get demuxers/decoders/etc. a reasonable amount of containers and codecs (certainly some of the most important ones from a free software distribution's POV) are supported by vlc native implementations without usage of libav/ffmpeg/whatever. Any of the plugins can be dropped, which will naturally reduce feature or format support, but not impair libvlc's functionality at large. So a simple ldd check will tell you which plugins to exclude to get an ffmpeg-free package. ^ This is also how one can get smaller monolithic phonon-vlc binary packages BTW. Tomahawk for example strips a lot of the unused vlc plugins from their windows and osx binaries to reduce the size. HS