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

[Lee Braiden]

On Thursday 11 Dec 2003 6:30 pm, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> But as hackers, a lot of us want our program *and all its dependencies*
> to be Free so the whole thing can be modified, and given to our friend
> across the road without breaking any laws.

Moreover, we like our end-products to be open too -- hence the enthusiastic 
investment in blender so that people can develop free models, free plugins, 
free scenes, and free open source movies.  Hence, the interest in free 
compilers for free code.

We don't want to produce videos in a closed format that aren't guaranteed to 
be available in future.  No more than we want to distribute documents in Word 
format.  We want to distribute videos that can be opened and edited on any 
open source platform, knowing that platform has and always will have the 
tools available to use the video.

In this sense, real video formats, unless completely open, cannot ever be more 
than backwards compatibility options to be replaced by Theora, etc.

Finally, and still most importantly for me, what Open Source desktops need 
most right now in terms of multimedia is a standardised API so that all video 
tools can automatically access the same codecs, etc.

I want to know that any movies I make in a 3D app can be encoded in all of the 
formats my NLE app can handle.  I want to know that my movie player can play 
them all back just as easily, and that my open source game can play them as 
an intro sequence.  It's only logical.

So, while others question technical license details, I'm simply asking this... 
what's being offered that Open Source needs or wants?

-- 
Lee.