[gst-devel] Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting

[Greg Wright]

From: "Ronald Bultje" <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
>
> Hi,
> 
> [added CC to gstreamer-devel]
> 
> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 19:28, Lee Braiden wrote:
> > This might be a bit provocational (sorry), but I'm wondering why you don't 
> > work with the gstreamer folks, and just make codecs or bugfix the ui?  That 
> > would make helix a MUCH better opensource project, imho.
> 
> Being one of the GStreamer developers, I'd like to advocate this point
> too. Given the current license of the (closed-source) Real codecs
> included in Helix, it's hard for us to add proper Real support to the
> default Gnome media framework. If you guys are looking for true
> integration in the Gnome desktop, GStreamer is the way to go. We already
> provide Gtk+/Gnome video widgets, integration in the file manager, etc.
> 
> I'd love to wrap up all of the Real codecs myself, but the license (as
> far as I've read it) doesn't allow for this to be included in
> distributions, which makes it sort of useless. There's lots of options
> (but all require some action from your side) to overcome this:
> 
> * change the license to allow wrapping inside opensource media
> frameworks. We'd be happy to wrap them up. In the best case, change it
> in such a way that distributions can include it in their default
> install.

If you didn't attend yesterday's conf-call/IRC meeting, we are looking
into ways to make this happen. We can't guarantee anything but we are
very interested in having this as an option. It is very obvious to us
how our current licensing is limiting the adoption of Helix and the 
Real codecs to the open source world. 

> * create your own plug-ins (outside of the GStreamer Plug-ins package)
> and make it available to the public on your website. Not as good as the
> first option, but still good. Note that we try to make the various
> future GStreamer 0.8.x releases to be API/ABI stable, so this should
> work quite well for you. We won't guarantee ABI/API stability, but
> that's more of a lousy disclaimer than something you should really worry
> about. The 0.6.x series have been API/ABI stable, too.
> * opensource your Real codecs so we can integrate them directly in the
> GStreamer Plug-ins package (hey, I can always try. ;) ).

The biggest problem for us is that there are parts of the codecs that we
do not have distribution rights for. We really strived to open source as
much as we possibly could but our hands are tied, in certain areas, due to
the same problems you have with our binary only codecs. We simply have not
been granted permission to release bits of code that we use.

I am sure that as time goes on we will be able to come up with a 
solution. It is just going to take a bit longer then we would all
like I think.

Thanks for the input and all your ideas.
--greg.

Greg Wright
Core-dev RealNetworks.



> 
> If you're interested in any of this, let us know. We'll be happy to
> cooperate. Whichever of the options you choose, we all win.
> 
> Ronald
> 
> -- 
> Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
> Linux Video/Multimedia developer
>