Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 29th Aug 2007 00:16 UTC, submitted by irbis
"With the release of Windows Vista, using your PC to watch and record TV has become a whole lot easier. Now, for the first time, Windows Media Center comes bundled with Home Premium and Ultimate versions of the standard Desktop operating system. However, Vista is pricey, and its form and function are of course dictated by Microsoft. If you want full control over your Home Theater PC, and don't want to have to pay Microsoft for it, then Linux is a more than capable alternative base for building a system of your own."
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Member since:
2006-07-04
"In the mean time, you want people to obey GPL, then you better start obeying MP3, DVDCSS, AACS and AC3 licenses.
I don't see anybody ponying up money to purchase "Real" licenses and provide them to the Linux Media Center users."
Well, the OSS model seems to be to force the burden of obtaining "real" licenses onto the user.
For example, VideoLAN says the following regarding their VLC media player:
http://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_about_pers...
"Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.
With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.
This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet. "
Of course, we all know that almost no user of VLC takes time to obtain the licenses, so the above statement might be accompanied by a wink-wink of the eye.