Apple-VideoLAN partnership announced, Mac VLC to be Intel only

[Sam Hocevar]

Apple-VideoLAN partnership announced, Mac VLC to be Intel only

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Paris, France (2006/04/01) - In an effort to help Apple with its Intel
transition, the VideoLAN team, distributor of the industry leading
cross-platform media player VLC, announced its intent to drop support
for the now outdated G4 and G5 based series of Mac computers.

"We had to do something for Apple in return," former project leader
Antoine Cellerier said in a public statement earlier today. Cellerier
was referring to Apple's stance against the French DADVSI law. The
controversed law, voted in March 2006 by French MPs, seriously
jeopardizes VLC's development by forbidding French citizens to use
software that bypasses Digital Right Management, such as DVD encryption
or the protection scheme commonly found on music bought on the Internet.

But in late March 2006, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said the DADVSI
law would "result in state-sponsored piracy." Apple then threatened to
take down its French iTunes Music Store.

Despite Apple's tendency to send cease and desist letters to every
website on the Internet, the VideoLAN team immediately understood that
they were in fact trying to help Free Software. "After all, they built
OS X on top of FreeBSD's cremated remains, and used what could still be
saved from KDE's bloated web browser to develop Safari, which can only
mean they fully embrace Open Source," VideoLAN developer Sam Hocevar
added.

The VideoLAN team hence announced that starting from the next release,
VLC would only run on Mac Intel hardware. Apple is already ahead
of schedule; the Mac Intels were originally announced for June of
2006, yet that mark was beaten by almost half a year. Apple is
confident VideoLAN's move will help finish the transition. "VLC is
the most downloaded OS X application. By making it Mac Intel only,
we can probably make the transition even faster. Let's not repeat
the PowerPC fiasco," an Apple spokesperson said. The M68K to PowerPC
transition, initiated in the 90s, led to the so-called "fat binaries"
and excruciatingly slow versions of the Mac OS.

When asked how long older versions of VLC for the G4 and G5 series of
processors would remain available, a VideoLAN webmaster said, "You'd
better hurry. Our software is free, but webspace and bandwidth aren't."

About VideoLAN:
VideoLAN (http://www.videolan.org/) is a project to build open source,
cross-platform multimedia tools. Their VLC media player is the most
downloaded Mac OS X application according to versiontracker.com.

About Apple:
Apple is the creator of the hyped and overpriced Macintosh computer.
Until recently, Apple buyers could brag in front of PC users about how
their PowerPC-based computer was twice as expensive, but also twice
as powerful as the Intel-based counterpart. Now, thanks to the Intel
transition, Apple computers are only twice as expensive.

-- 
This is the videolan-announce mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/support/lists.html