bluecurve

[Andrew Gorcester]

Yeah, I know stuff like DVD and DivX support can't be legally included
(actually, I'm not so sure about OpenDivX, but I wouldn't want to take
the legal risk either).  However, although mp3s aren't a true open
standard, they're the defacto standard and RedHat can definitely afford
to license them (Be, Inc. did, and they were one step from financial
ruin at the time).  And RH could at least make the effort and include a
decent media player with hooks for external codecs, so the user could
either install DeCSS and DivX, or just watch MPEG and MPEG2 movies. 
Right?

Plus, people with DVD burners have a lot of use for support for
unencrypted DVDs.  THAT's legal.  I think.

Anyway, there's no use griping.  I don't care what they include out of
the box for my own sake, I use Debian.  But it'd be nice to be able to
suggest such a visually pretty distro to my media-loving friends.

-Andrew


On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 07:14:49 -0800
"Jesse Keating" <hosting at j2solutions.net> wrote:

> On Monday 06 January 2003 01:12, Andrew Gorcester uttered:
> > Maybe I should make a CD with all of the requisite media packages,
> > and an install script to use on new RH installs?  But it seems like
> > something Redhat should be doing, not me.
> 
> Therein lies the rub.  They can't legally include mp3 stuff, nor decss
> stuff.  Media players are quite useless w/out decss (for dvd), and
> well, xmms does .ogg.  Think back a couple years.  Windows Media
> Player never did mp3 until recently, so you'd have to go out and
> install WinAmp to play your mp3s.  Of course, Microsoft doesn't have
> to worry about GPL, and can easily afford to pay out the fee per mp3
> enabled Windows sold.
> 
> -- 
> Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE
> For Web Services and Linux Consulting, Visit --> j2Solutions.net
> Mondo DevTeam (www.mondorescue.org)
> 
> Was I helpful?  Let others know:
>  http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating
>