Jon Bringing WMV9 to Linux 467
julie-h writes "DVD Jon has done it again. This time it wasn't Apple the target, but Microsoft's WMV9 video format. There is as always a working Proof of Concept program with screenshots."
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Jon Bringing WMV9 to Linux
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Re:How does Jon (Score:5, Insightful)
support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a mother in law who is Hungarian, when she visits, she watches hungarian language programming, offered only in, windows media format.
Mixed feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:slashdotting... (Score:1, Insightful)
My fedora desktop looks like garbage.
Re:Bringing WMV9 to linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Fool!
That's all we care about. Why do you think we make so much of an issue about companies making exclusive deals to release video and audio in formats that don't have any sort of official support from the format creator? It's not like we own DVD-audio players and our music only comes in SACD; the ability to play WM9 is only several hundred lines of code away and yet we're expected to purchase a completely different operating system to be able to play them.
The sad story about using "illegal" code in Linux (isn't libdvdread still like this?) is that it is often more useful than the a) hard to find b) not that great altenative. I personally find that where there is both a commercial and free version of a linux program ported from Windows, the commercial version acts like cripple-ware.
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
What DVD John has done might be legally dubious, but it is certainly not immoral or unethical.
Re:why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Media Companies Should Support Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bringing WMV9 to linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Only illegal laws.
Re: Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How does Jon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotted already (Score:3, Insightful)
When people who didn't get permission from the site owners stop posting stories. Oh, and when the editors start informing site admins before they post stories and link to mirrors if their site can't handle the load.
Re:If you want to watch your WMV now in linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm quite happy to see this. For one thing, using the dll is slow; too slow to run on my Epia. For another thing, an open source decoder means it should eventually make it to VNC on my Mac. A fast cross-platform decoder. Yes, please!
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:1, Insightful)
2) All you want is to be able to view a file that is freely downloadable.
3) If MS wants their royalities, then they should develop a version for the *nix folks. But as you know, they won't develop anything for Linux / BSD because it could eventually lead people away from their base product Windows (cash cow).
As a side note: I think the term for cash cow is a little mis-leading for MS. Should be more like cash elephant.
JMHO.
This is what Americans get wrong *all the time* (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm too tired for real examples, but think of how often Dubya invokes God - very unsavory, if I should say so (see sig)
Re:If you want to watch your WMV now in linux... (Score:2, Insightful)
For all you Europeans reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
As you're in the one region of the world that seems to not be bowing down to corporate interests at every opportunity, please do what you can to ensure it doesn't happen.
I *want* to watch video on my Linux box; I don't want to have to buy MS product just so my kids can watch movies that we've paid for.
Re:How does Jon (Score:4, Insightful)
Their chances of getting a conviction if they try approach zero though.
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
Go ahead, bet the farm on it, and I'll cover a tenner of it, betting on ogg being clean. That gauntlet was thrown down 2+ years ago by the ogg/vorbis folks who after the mp3 camp claimed there had to be an infringement AIUI, mailed a copy of the code to the fahnhoffer (sp, please, I'm american and I couldn't spell that right if it was painted on the friggin wall) legal folks and dared them to find an infringment. 2 years later, there has been no further saber rattling by the fahnhoffer people.
Besides, if you'll take a 192 kilobit mp3, and compare it to an about 160 kilobyte variable rate ogg, about a g7 quality, I challenge you to an a/b test where you have no idea which is which. BUT, you'll very reliably pick the ogg as the best sounding of the two, and do it well over 95% of the time.
Hell, my ears are 70 years old and I wore out 3 rifle barrels before I ever bought any earmuffs, so they aren't cherry ears by any means (Carhart notches 120 db deep for instance), but I did that comparison and picked the ogg nearly 100% of the time.
Gawd I get tired of hearing winderz sheeple claim the linux camp is nothing but a bunch of thieves. Is your copy of winderz legal? More than likely its a bit of a grey market from some cloner. If I had any M$ on site, it would be 100% legal, but I've never owned an M$ product other than whats in the roms of some of my vintage computers, and I don't intend to expand that, ever... If I need dos for something, its drdos-7.03 that gets booted.
You may have intended that to be sarcasm, but it wasn't taken that way.
No Cheers, Gene
Re:Bringing WMV9 to linux (Score:5, Insightful)
A. One that hasn't been tested in court.
Who's to say that there's any valid IP in WMV9 ? Of all organisations, MS and the US Patent Office are the last I'd trust to tell me.
Re:Bringing WMV9 to linux (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:it's Christian according to Declaration (Score:2, Insightful)
i don't listen to that guy...how does the joke go?
what's the difference between rush limbaugh and the hindenburg??
one's a big fat nazi windbag, and the other's a blimp
if this message came across as 'w00t g0d' or something like that, it was not supposed to...
Re:Decoder only, or encoder too? (Score:5, Insightful)
WMV is a closed, proprietary codec. Please don't encode your files into that format. }:)
-Z
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you want to watch your WMV now in linux... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can put, for example, XviD and mp3 inside wmv, and it will be perfectly playable with MPlayer on almost any platform.
wmv9, the video codec, however, has no open source implementation. Thus, xine and mplayer will at most only play such files on x86 machines.
Re:How does Jon (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does Jon (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For all you Europeans reading this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Morally it is your right to do so. Legally it may not be---because the big software and media companies have corrupted governments to extend copyright and patent law beyond what is in the public interest.
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I understand it's not legally dubious in his jurisdiction. He is not bound by US law in any way. Whether people in the US are allowed to use his work is another matter, but that's really not his problem.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Licensing Windows Media for Other Platforms (Score:5, Insightful)
That is most definately the WRONG way to go about it.
The RIGHT way is to push content providers to use technologies that we don't have to license, such as Vorbis, Theora, MPEG-1, Dirac, etc.
Imagine if all the percieved gaps in Linux were fixed the same way... People using Linux will want photoshop, so license Photoshop for Linux, rather than creating The GIMP.
Pay the license fee to get DVD decryption in a Linux player, but it must be binary-only, and limited to the same features you find in Windows DVD players (no DVD-backups for you!).
Re:Breaks license terms for sure (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is the problem and why MS are going to have a hard time trying to crack down on any attempts to stop Linux being able to run WMV.
Thanks to the "marvel" of Windows Movie Maker people with Windows XP can create these files from their Home PC without needing to either shell out on over-expensive software (except maybe Windows XP) or use pirate software (again, except maybe Windows XP). Unless there's a way of getting Windows Movie Maker to use other codecs then there is going to be more and more home content that will be open by nature but closed by implementation.
And unless there's a decent free alternative (which I'd like to know about, too) for editing video on Windows I can't think of any way of persuading these people to use formats that can be easily read elsewhere - hence needing to use what's unfortunately not a legal implementation just to play the stuff back.
Re:Licensing Windows Media for Other Platforms (Score:1, Insightful)
And then watch Micro$oft take the liberty of NOT licensing the DRM-related parts of it... just as Linspire's Michael Robertson unfortunately did for the Linspire distro just last week:
http://www.linspire.com/lindows_michaelsminutes_a
Conclusion: Forget it! We need free formats, not such utter crap! And financially supporting such crap is even worse...