Re: [xine-user] DivX open source

[Hetz B. H. <het...@co...>]

On Friday 26 January 2001 17:13, Guenter Bartsch wrote:
> Hi Hetz,
>
> On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Hetz wrote:
> > > very confusing. The reference implementation (on which this is
> > > obviously based) is (C) MPEG Software Simulation Group - I never really
> > > understood their license, but I doubt that it's GPL compatible...
> >
> > The license of MPEG-4 actually is pretty simple -
>
> what do you mean by "license of MPEG-4" - are you talking about the
> reference implementation or about the written standard?

Yes.

>
> > If you want - I can contact them and ask if a player implementation of
> > their OpenDivX based on the source code they released - can be put under
> > GPL. If they agree - do you want to implement/write a player?
>
> well - I can't promise anything, but I'm highly interested in this. At the
> moment, I'm busy doing xine 0.4.0 and if I succeed, the xine "engine" will
> have it's final architecture by mid next week (time to celebrate, then we
> could really start fine-tuning performance, adding all those smaller
> features people keep asking about such as subtitles or fast
> forward... :)).

License for OpenDivx: http://www.projectmayo.com/opendivx/license.php

As much as I understood from their forums - they don't have any object to 
include it inside any player at all - they even mention that mpeglib got 
opendivx support..

>
> I haven't had time to look that closely at their sources yet, but what
> I've seen looks like it could easily integrated in xine. So if you have
> time, feel free to contact them and ask them what they think.

No need. Read my comment about..

>
> I also read they're planning for a clean-room reimplementation of the
> mpeg4 stuff, so that'd be particularly interesting IMHO. But let's hear
> what they have to say. Again, the legal issues come first, so what'd be
> interesting is: what code did they write themselves, what did they re-use
> and under what copyright was the code they used ... and, of course, do
> they think we could GPL their code.

About the MPEG-4 - I really don't know much. I know its perfectly legal to 
start writing your own implementation - but is it worth doing it? I would 
hold it until I see what the project-mayo guys are doing, and then decide 
what to do about mpeg-4. Thats my opinion only.

> > > And one last point: I didn't want to mention this that early, but I
> > > have been experimenting with the mpeg1encoder from Berkeley
> >
> > Now you do encoding also? I thought xine was in the decoding area :)
>
> actually, encoding was where I started. I hacked a little program
> ("xlask") that decoded mpeg2 and re-encoded it in mpeg1 using the berkeley
> encoder - I thought maybe I could watch my DVDs that way. But when I had
> my first streams, I realized that I had no real good player for mpeg1 as
> well - so I started working on OMS and when that didn't seem to produce
> useable results started xine .... once xine is really in a useable state I
> hope I can return to xlask, at least, if that's still needed ... I see
> quite some tools for encoding out there, so maybe there's no need for
> xlask any more, I don't know (if you want to have a look at a pretty
> complete list of current mpeg/video-related projects take a look at the
> open documentation ("MoinMoin WikiWiki web") on www.linuxvideo.org

Well, some good real-time mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 encoding is needed :)

Hetz

>
> Regards,
>
>    Guenter