Gerry Carr has announced on the Canonical Blog that Fluendo and CyberLink will now be selling their multimedia wares through the Canonical Store. Fluendo is the company supporting the development of GStreamer and they sell several proprietary codecs for providing a legal media playback experience on Linux. Among these codecs are Windows Media, MPEG2, and MPEG4. CyberLink on the other hand is selling their PowerDVD software for Ubuntu.
Fluendo's Windows Media and MP3 codecs for GStreamer can be purchased for about $25 USD to enable legal Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, Windows Media MMS, Windows Media ASF Demuxer, and MP3 Audio decoding. Their complete codec pack, which adds MPEG2, MPEG4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, MPEG2 Program Stream and Transport Stream, AAC, and MPEG4 ISO costs about $40 USD.
CyberLink's PowerDVD for Linux enables the legal video playback of commercial DVD movies. The Linux version of PowerDVD also has Dolby Digital Audio support as well as for remote controls. This proprietary software will set you back $50 USD as a digital download through the Canonical Shop.
canonical (http://blog.canonical.com/?p=37) via phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjcyNw)
Hm. So is there any technical advantage to this software over medibuntu (http://www.medibuntu.org/)?
I'm always happy to see options become available to people, but I refuse to pay anyone for what amounts to patents on pure math, which are invalid. Because a corrupt and broken system grants people patents on pure math doesn't mean I'm obliged to play along.
I'm *somewhat* tempted to purchase something from Fluendo simply to support them and their sponsorship of GStreamer, but I'm hard pressed to bring myself to "purchase" a license to do math. I'll have to look into their other products and see if they have an application I'd be willing to pay for.
patents on pure math
Oh, but it is
applied math. The purists won't even touch that.
(By and large I agree with you on the moral issue though. No-one has monopoly on truth, and no-one should be granted monopoly on truths.)
I could sit down with a pencil and paper and do the calculations to encode and then decode a given set of digital audio samples.. It might take me my entire life to do it for 10 seconds of audio, but it's just doing a lot of math. Using a computing tool to speed up the process does not make doing math patentable.
Using a computing tool to speed up the process does not make doing math patentable.
No, laws make doing math patentable. Laws are not necessarily consistent. Courts resolve the ambiguities that emerge in practice.
I'm always happy to see options become available to people, but I refuse to pay anyone for what amounts to patents on pure math, which are invalid. Because a corrupt and broken system grants people patents on pure math doesn't mean I'm obliged to play along.
the ideas underlying patents on mp3, h.264/avc, and other codecs are not based on pure math. gotta love those people who bump five-year old threads just to add their nonsensical blubber.
Wow.. I didn't realize the thread was that old.. It was on the front page of HA when I replied to it so I assumed it was new and didn't check the date.
And please tell me exactly what parts of mp3 and h.264 aren't based on math..
It was on the front page of HA when I replied to it
Spam – bumping old ideas to life since 1999!
And please tell me exactly what parts of mp3 and h.264 aren't based on math..
It is based on science and research. The expression of it just happens to be math. You might not like paying for things you think that you are entitled to, but without patents, MP3's technologies would have likely stayed proprietary inside things like videoconferencing software, and we'd all still be buying CDs and using our walkmans, listening to MIDI files on the internet and occassionally downolading low-quality ADPCM files.
I could sit down with a pencil and paper and do the calculations to encode and then decode a given set of digital audio samples.. It might take me my entire life to do it for 10 seconds of audio, but it's just doing a lot of math. Using a computing tool to speed up the process does not make doing math patentable.
Not without having spent a significant portion of time learning and reading academic articles about how psychoacoustic masking works.
And please tell me exactly what parts of mp3 and h.264 aren't based on math..
It is based on science and research.
Yeah ... in contrast to math, which is not “science and research” ...
No one said anything of the sort. Sorry to bust your bubble but not all science and research is entrenched in math.
The math-centric POV reminds me of an arrogant diff eqs professor I once had. He literally told us he could do anything any engineer of any discipline could do because he knew all the math.
No one said anything of the sort.
Yeah sure, no-one claimed explicitely to have written anything that had to do with what was quoted.
Replace “math” in yourlord's statement by “carrots” and “science and research” by “food and vegetable” and read again.
The math-centric POV
This was all about the form of the argument and hardly anything about math per se, except I assumed that mathematics would qualify as a subset of the “science and research”. That is “subset”, not “superset”.
arrogant
Guilty as charged.
Spam – bumping old ideas to life since 1999!
oh.
yourlord,
apologies. shouldn't have assumed that you had nothing better to do than to comment on a five-year old news thread
What cool linux apps are actually using gstreamer today?
What cool linux apps are actually using gstreamer today?
the default media players in recent ubuntu desktops (rhythmbox for audio and totem for video) use gstreamer. i'd only consider rhythmbox cool, though, totem not so much
What cool linux apps are actually using gstreamer today?
No, the bigger issue is when Linux apps were cool to begin with. Having to have a Linux audio conference over audio APIs is downright shameful of a OS. You would think people would ratify a API, but nooooo....everyone has to code thier own API.
No, the bigger issue is when Linux apps were cool to begin with. ... everyone has to code thier own API.
that could be one downside to freedom. speaking as an Ubuntu user, I don't care how many APIs there are - seems like audio works anyway.