[BozemanLUG] The mind behind Linux

[Joshua J Cogliati]

On 05/05/2016 10:44 AM, Scott Dowdle wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> It is only available in MP4 format, which cannot be legally played
>> in the United States with free software.  Ironic.
> 
> That is not quite accurate.  Cisco supposedly has paid royalty fees
> to be able to freely distribute an mp4 decoder and it is used in
> newer versions of Firefox I believe... or can be.  I'm not sure if
> Firefox ships it or not.  I installed it some time ago and don't
> remember the details.  Also, I think the royalty holders care more
> about encoding royalties than decoding... and I think they have
> basically had a public agreement to not seek decoding royalties for
> years... although that may change.
Well, I did specify free software :)  I think tho' that Fedora was
trying to see if they could generate a byte for byte match compile and
possibly ship that.

I don't think it is used in firefox for video decoding:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats

From the bugzilla entry:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1057646
"OpenH264 also needs to support Main and High Profile H.264 before it's
really useful for <video>."

There is also the problem that many MP4 files use AAC for audio, which
is still patented I think, and does not have a workaround like Cisco's
OpenH264.




> 
> Other oddities... folks like Linux Journal (who I have left many
> comments on), PBS, and NPR use closed formats and codecs too... and
> you would think they wouldn't but they do.
> 
> I have re-encoded the video into webm (vp9/opus) if you would prefer
> to watch that.
> 
> https://www.montanalinux.org/files/videos/Linus_Torvalds-Ted_2016.webm

Thank you.

>  I don't think this interview with Linus is particularly insightful
> nor informative... and he does seem quite uncomfortable during it...
> but hey, it does raise his, Linux's, and git's stature to some degree
> doesn't it?!
> 
> Oh, BTW... I attended a presentation on software patents at LFNW and
> it was about how a fairly recent patent case (Alice) has
> theoretically invalidated a significant percentage software patents
> and lead to a greatly reduced number of them being filed.  I don't
> know if Alice could be said to apply to the various patents related
> to mp4 or not.  If interested, here's a recording of that talk:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR0QEQ3VqU0
> 
> TYL,
> 


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