[Vm-dev] Official VM missing MPEGPlugin

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Mon Jan 17 20:28:55 UTC 2011


Well the mpeg code is licensed GPL and re-licensed for us as LGPL and Squeak-L 

However the issue likely is that no-one wants to see if the  Mpeg LA guys http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2S/Pages/Intro.aspx view the code base as an infringement on their patents.  The answer to this likely would be yes, as they can pay the lawyers to hash out the actual yes/no.

Personally the linux guys should work with the gstreamer plugin, and over on the windows/macintosh side play with the quicktime logic . 

Although you can in theory install gstreamer on windows, the installation on os-x in non-trival and I doubt anyone who doesn't work with MacPorts is willing to install 
the massive amount of software needed to support it when the Quicktime logic just works... 

Therefore I'd suggest end-of-life for the mpeg plugin and work the alternate choices. 


On 2011-01-17, at 12:10 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 01:40:15PM -0500, Matthew Fulmer wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 12:14:56PM -0500, David T. Lewis wrote:
>>>>  http://cobalt.cs.duke.edu/pub/alien.mpeg
>>> 
>>> FYI, access is denied to this file:
>>> 
>>>  Forbidden
>>> 
>>>  You don't have permission to access /pub/alien.mpeg on this server.
>>>  Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Server at cobalt.cs.duke.edu Port 80
>> 
>> fixed
>> 
>> -- 
>> Matthew Fulmer (a.k.a. Tapple)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> To follow up on the original question: I looked into the issue on
> the unix VM, and it turns out there are problems in the CMake
> configuration script, which is excluding the actual Mpeg3Plugin.c
> file from the build (hence the plugin "loads" but no actual
> primitives are present), and which also enables pthreads in the
> plugin (which leads to crashes for reasons that as far as I know
> have never been diagnosed).
> 
> I sent a patch for the configuration to Ian, but it's enough
> of a hack that I won't embarrass myself further by posting it
> here. Turns out Ian is in Kyoto at the moment, so he'll probably
> have a look at it in a week or so.
> 
> Meanwhile, a question for Bert concerning the MPEG plugin:
> 
> Ian mentioned that "the MPEG plugin was removed from the standard
> Linux distribution because of licensing issues.  OLPC/RedHat would
> not take the VM with it included."
> 
> So - is it OK to include the MPEG plugin as an external plugin in
> the standard binary VM distributions?
> 
> Thanks,
> Dave
> 

--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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