Why Linux has problems with proprietary multimedia...

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > > Apple and Microsoft have paid up royalties on these things ...
> >
> > ... which has me wondering: how does Ubuntu get away with shipping all
> > of the stuff necessary to do DVD-authoring!?
> 
>   While I've never touched Ubuntu's "DVD authoring" stuff, I can add
> some additional speculations, in addition to maddog's very cogent
> points:
> 
>   At a lower level, a DVD is just a filesystem.  They don't have to be
> restricted using anyone's special crypto, nor do they have to use any
> particular codec.  In order for them to play in a consumer appliance
> which implements "DVD Video" and *only* DVD Video, the files have to
> have particular names and use particular codecs, but they still don't
> need special crypto.  Many consumer appliance these days implement
> additional codecs, meaning the files just have to particular names if
> you don't care about broad compatibility.

The particular GUI-level package at which I was looking is called
"DeVeDe". A Ubuntu-using co-worker of mine pointed it out to me and
basically described it as `exactly what you want, if you want to
create DVDs to play on TV'.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."