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

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi all,

I've added licensing at open.helixcommunity.org to this distribution, so 
that the right folks at RealNetworks are aware of this discussion and 
can more easily participate.  Normally, that list requires subscription 
to send mail to it, but I've taken that restriction off for the time being.

More inline:

Ronald Bultje wrote:
> 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.

We're looking for integration into GNOME, but we're also looking at 
producing a world-class, *cross-platform* multimedia system, and we've 
got to focus on the one we've got (Helix).  While it's theoretically 
possible to port GStreamer to Windows, Mac OS, and Symbian (for 
example), it's *done* for Helix.

If we allow our codecs to be used by other multimedia frameworks, we're 
just encouraging more splintering -- for Linux developers would work on 
improving GStreamer (improving the experience only for Linux users) 
rather than work on Helix (improving the experience for everyone). 
Besides that, we would have to convince Intel, Sony, VoiceAge and many 
others that this is a great idea, since much of what is in RealAudio and 
RealVideo is licensed from them.  While it would be extremely generous 
for us to do this, there's not much of a business case for RealNetworks 
to institute such a giveaway.

We may just be at an impasse here, because years of work have gone into 
GStreamer and Helix, and neither group is going to drop years of work to 
move to another platform.  However, I find it very difficult to believe 
that any commercial Linux distributor in the United States is going to 
be able to ship anything that is simultaneously legal and useful based 
on what is in GStreamer today.

Rob