[gst-devel] [Announcement] Libmms 0.1 released

[Maciej Katafiasz]

Hi fellow hackers,
after way too long delay we are happy, and also somewhat relieved to
announce that release 0.1 "Still faster than Duke" of Libmms is ready
for immediate consumption. Release notes attached.

Enjoy!

-- 
Maciej Katafiasz <ml at mathrick.org>
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Libmms 0.1 "Still faster than Duke"
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* What?

This is first public release of libmms, common library for accessing Microsoft
Media Server (MMS) media streaming protocol. MMS is proprietary streaming 
protocol used in Microsoft server products, commonly used to stream WMV data.
You can encounter mms:// style URLs all over the 'net, especially on news sites
and other content-serving sites. Libmms allows you to download content from such
sites, making it easy to add MMS support to your media applications.

* Why?

Until now, there was no commonly available implementation for accessing MMS
streams under liberal license, forcing each project wanting to support MMS
protocol to either create its own implementation, or engage into often nasty
licensing issues. Libmms addresses that needs by being available as library,
licensed under GNU Library General Public Licence (LGPL), thus being readily
available for use in your project, be it open source or proprietary.

* Where?

Libmms is available from SourceForge, just go to 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/libmms/ to get source tarball. Packages for
specific distributions may follow shortly and will also be available from SF.

* How?

Installation is easy and straightforward, unless we've let some bugs go unnoticed.
Just follow familiar ./configure && make && make install procedure and you'll
be alright. However, if you run into any problems with installation or operation
of libmms, please report to maintainers so we can fix it. We expect libmms to 
compile and work on any modern Unix system, but didn't test on platforms other
than Linux. Feedback as well as patches to build process will be appreciated.

* Known issues and TODO

- Seeking is not implemented yet (on TODO)
- No support for encrypted streams (unlikely to be fixed)
- No support for DRM'd streams (unlikely to be fixed)
- Default network methods implementation probably won't compile on Win32, and
  certainly won't work there (on TODO, patches very welcome)
- No Xine integration yet (on TODO). There is however GStreamer plugin already
  available in GStreamer CVS. Gnome-VFS module is also on TODO
- Depends on GLib (on TODO, will be solved by either removing the dependency, or
  preferably getting GLib into C standard library :)

* Thanks

Many thanks go to Xine (http://xinehq.de/) team, who generously agreed to
relicense their MMS plugin code as LGPL, on which libmms is based. Thanks
to Majormms, who created original implementation, and to SDP Project, whose
great protocol specification made it possible in the first place.