[MPlayer-dev-eng] FFII software patent demo, politics, KiSS

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi

On Monday 19 April 2004 05:42, Diego Biurrun wrote:
[...]
> On a more technical note, a thing both Alan and Georg would love to
> see in the future are free codecs.  It's true, apart from flac, ffv1
> and MJPEG all seem to be patent encumbered.  We told them we are
iam not sure if ffv1 is free of patents, i surely hope it is but i plain dont 
know
anyway, if any patented parts are found in ffv1 ill replace them if theres 
some free alternative

designing a new lossy video codec like mpeg isnt difficult, whats difficult is 
reaching better compression/quality then existing codecs or avoiding patents

> working on a next generation free container format.  Georg had an idea
> that Alan liked very much: We might make MPlayer print out an
> informational warning message if it plays patent encumbered formats.
> He said that should we decide to implement such a thing the FSF will
> help us with researching the relevant patents.
sounds interresting, as long as theres a way to turn it off
but what exactly do we mean with patent encumbered?
is it enough if conforming codecs are legally safe, or must every part of a 
codec be useable for anything?
btw, a GUI could also show a small icon somewhere which changes depending upon 
the freeness of the format, much like the http/https icons from web browsers

[...]
-- 
Michael
level[i]= get_vlc(); i+=get_vlc();		(violates patent EP0266049)
median(mv[y-1][x], mv[y][x-1], mv[y+1][x+1]);	(violates patent #5,905,535)
buf[i]= qp - buf[i-1];				(violates patent #?)
for more examples, see http://mplayerhq.hu/~michael/patent.html
stop it, see http://petition.eurolinux.org & http://petition.ffii.org/eubsa/en