John M McIntosh wrote:

> Well I did peek at the XINE-Lib suggestion and noticed that it does 
> not run on most BSD based unixs, windows or macintosh os-9. This rules
> it out for  providing as a cross-platform generic solution.
> Plus of course the USA deemed illegal decoding of copy protection 
> logic makes it a undesirable product to associate my name with since I
> am within reach of the Hollywood  lawyers.


Yes, for that reason the actual decryption algorithm is a seperate
product, "libdcss".

-- I really enjoy watching LoTR on my computer even though the ppl at
NewLine are a bunch of evil $%*(s who put spyware on their DVDs and
under-pay Peter Jackson by $100m

Wile the BSD based systems are not without technical merit, I consider
them a throwaback to the age when Unix ran only on minicomputers and
were acessd only with dumb terminals. -- I am acquainted with a user
that only uses his BSD machine in that fassion.

Therefore I don't consider it a valid target platform for Squeak. -- The
users aren't interested in multimedia environments at all!


>I will note the mpegplugin which is based on the source from
>  http://heroinewarrior.com/libmpeg3.php3 could be updated.  If someone
in the
> community is willing to cross  check the current source code back to
the squeak
> tree this would be a useful service and I would be  happy to help them.


I'm sorry but I'm going to have to call that an extremely bad idea.  It
is exactly the reason OpenOffice is a 220mb download and an extremely
fragile build.  Here's proof:

##############################
*  app-office/openoffice
      Latest version available: 1.1.4-r1
      Latest version installed: 1.1.4-r1
      Size of downloaded files: 222,339 kB
      Homepage:    http://www.openoffice.org/
      Description: OpenOffice.org, a full office productivity suite.
      License:     || ( LGPL-2 SISSL-1.1 )
##############################


A sane solution would be to detect the presence of libmpeg3 and link to it.

Ideally, this would be done with FFI so that the interface class can be
maintained by compiling updated C header files into Smalltalk. The VM
code would not have to be touched -- ever. (Well, nobody does so anyway
for reasons I mentioned earlier...)


> Our current source tree has changes mostly to make it macintosh os-9 
> friendly, provide macintosh ARGB support, tuning tweaks, MMX
> alterations and removal of DCSS and other non- licenced technology
> such as Dolby sound extensions.
> And of course it's quite platform agnostic.


Yes, this supports my thesis about why we shouldn't care about *BSD users.