[vlc] Re: VLC and WMV--anything being done?

[Benjamin Pracht]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005, Terry Jackson wrote :
> Hi group!
> I am using VLC 0.81 on a Mac running Panther (10.3.9)
> and was just curious if anything was being done to
> address VLC¹s inability to play back .WMV files,
> due to MS new DRM structure. It seems like more and more,
> .wmvs are being encoded with this DRM, and it makes it
> impossible to play them using VLC, almost to the point
> that I avoid websites altogether that have their video
> encoded in .wmv.
> 
> Of course, the last build of WMPlayer for the Mac is v .9,
> and it can¹t handle these file either.
> 
> just wondering.....
> 

VLC won't be able to read the WMV3 codec until somebody publishes a free
decoder for it. ffmpeg is working on it, but this is a slow and painful
process since so specs are publically available ATM.

About the DRM feature, well, DRM is per nature incampatible with Open
source and free software, since most of DRM schemes rely on the fact
keys required to decode the stream must be kept secret, so don't expect
too much. The only way would be reverse ingeneering, which would be
illegal in many countries anyway (yes, this is the "nice" thing with
DRM).

-- 
BigBen

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