[vlc] Re: Sorenson Media

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

Hallo,

He was talking about promoting, not so much distributing I think. I would
also like to note that VLC's H.264 support is of course based on the ffmpeg
library.

First since it is concerning H.264 AND VLC I think it would be a good thing
to have a focus on streaming with these two technologies. There isn't much
stuff out there that can do this atm (QTSS 7.0 alpha probably). VLC is
furthermore a very versatile program that can allow you to combine this
capability with a number of possible exciting options (web interface,
transcoding, etc). A special eye catcher can be for instance streaming H.264
to a WinCE device. (Not sure how well this works on a Mobile device atm).
And of course a clear focal point should be VLC's platform independance.
Running on Mac, Win, Linux, BSD and mobile devices is a big boon for a
single product I think something which is too little realized by many folks.

These are major selling points of the VLC technology and as such allow for
drawing attention to VLC. Support and promotion by a company in this is
likely very welcomed by the VL team, because we usually spent more time
working on VLC then promoting ourselves.

There are of course some pitfalls. Until now we have been quite "free" as
programmers in what we do with VLC. I have a suspicion that being promoted
more will also require us to pay more attention to stability and User
Friendlyness, because the expectations will be higher. Something I
personally would welcome very much, but also something that is very
difficult for us to achief, because we don't really have the people suited
for this, nor the manpower. Hopefully more attention and more popularity
will also attract more developers with a larger range of capabilities (not
so much technical, but also design and testing wise), but I do see the need
for a bit more professionalisation in our immenant future to tackle these
problems.

There is also another point that is of interest and that is the legality and
licensing issues. As far as I know there is no licensing settled for AVC yet
(though there is for MPEG4). However in trusting that a similar arrangement
is made for AVC as there is for MPEG-4 and MPEG-2, we may need to put this
information clearer in our distribution files.

http://www.videolan.org/doc/faq/en/index.html#id2785322

That's my 2 cents.

---
Derk-Jan Hartman
Developer VLC media player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rémi Denis-Courmont" <Remi.Denis-Courmont at via.ecp.fr>
To: "Randon Morford" <rmorford at sorenson.com>
Cc: <vlc at videolan.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 11:02 AM
Subject: [vlc] Re: Sorenson Media


> Hello,
>
> Le jeudi 8 Juillet 2004 23:15, Randon Morford a écrit :
> > I am a product manager at Sorenson Media in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I
> > am very interested in possible working with your group.  Currently we
> > are working on the next release of Sorenson Squeeze (our encoding
> > software) and I am very pleased to see that you have your player
> > working with H.264.  We think that we will be able to get our H.264
> > working well with your player and I am interested in promoting the
> > VLC player and possibly contributing to it. We cannot compromise our
> > software in anyway and we do not want to make our encoder open to
> > anyone else.  What options for promoting, distributing, and
> > contributing do we have that would help your cause without expose our
> > code and technology?
>
> It depends on what you actually want to do with the VLC.
> The VLC Media Player is distributed under the GNU General Public
> License, which mandate the publication of source code of any extension
> made to it, to any of the people to whom you provide a copy of the VLC.
> We presume this is not an option for you.
>
> You and your customers are however entirely free to use and redistribute
> the VLC to read/decode video encoded with Sorenson Squeeze, so long as
> it is kept separate from VLC. If the VLC can decode data from Sorenson
> Squeeze already, it's just fine. If it cannot yet decode as is at the
> moment, you may:
> - develop compatibility with the VLC inside your encoding solution,
> whose source code won't have to be exposed at all,
> - and/or develop compatibility with your encoder inside the VLC. In that
> case, source code will have to be disclosed to any of your customer,
> should they ask, and they'll be allowed to modify, redistribute and use
> it freely. Therefore, you'd have to ensure that your encoding
> technology is not exposed in such a component if you don't want to.
>
>
> If you decide to distribute the VLC, whether for use with Sorenson
> Squeeze or not, the easiest way to comply with the requirements of our
> licensing terms is probably to notify your users that they can get the
> source code for VLC from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ .
>
> Do not hesitate to contact us at videolan at videolan.org if you have other
> informations or questions. We welcome your offer to promote and/or
> contribute to the VLC Media PLayer.
>
> Thank you for your interest in the VLC Media Player,
>
> Sincerely,


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