Re: [xine-devel] just an idea

[Mike M. <mel...@pc...>]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Michael Roitzsch wrote:

> There are for sure no technical problems here, but there might be legal 
> problems ahead. You cannot point to a download location for win32 codec 
> DLLs, because they are intellectual property of MS and other companies.
> Libdvdcss is also illegal in some countries, so you can run into trouble 
> there as well.

	You're right about the CSS point. However, there is a simple
HTTP-POST request/response sequence that can be employed for downloading
Microsoft Win32 DLLs from the official server. You open a request to port
80 on a server, issue a one-line POST request with the codec GUID and and
the server will tell you the real location from which to download the .CAB
file. Then you use the GPL'd cabextract utility to pull the codec binary
out. What would be the legal argument against this one? You are only
allowed to issue these standard HTTP requests using MS WMP? I'm not too
worried (remember, MS doesn't seem to care that a bunch of their core
media codecs have been RE'd).

	One question is where does this technique belong? In xine-lib or
the UI layer?

	There is also the issue of the QT and Real binary codecs. I don't
know if there are standard URLs we could count on for these.

--
	-Mike Melanson