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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 11:15 AM EDT |
Given the final note in the article, I figure a clarification here might be
useful.
MPlayer *supports* using various plugins, proprietary or not, that can be made
available to it in an install. It also bundles free software decoders from the
ffmpeg project via the libavcodec library.
The libavcodec library has for some time now had support for .wma and several
versions of .wmv. This support is decode-only, and I don't know what patents one
might choose to claim it violates (I tend to be reluctant to factor patent
claims into whether software is free or not because the nature patent field
makes such claims easy to make and hard to pin down), but it is entirely under a
free software license.
Distribution packaging of applications like this can sometimes make it hard to
get a 'clean' free-only version, this may ultimately depend on your
distribution. However, downloading and building the source code from the website
will provide only the basic free decoders and encoders.
I haven't looked at the videos at this point so I don't know if they use a
libavcodec-supported version of .wmv, but if you use an MPlayer install that
lacks any plugins, the worst that will happen is that you won't be able to play
the video (and should still be able to play the audio).
I was thrilled years ago to find out that this format had been
reverse-engineered to this extent (and ironically made "Windows Media
Player" the more GNU/Linux-friendly option on a lot of sites that offered
only proprietary formats, typically WMP and RealPlayer) due to the needs I had
as a college student to access material coded in this format, as the idea of
using WMP (or even its .dlls) for it was distinctly non-appealing.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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