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

[Terry Jackson]

on 6/8/05 3:21 PM, Benjamin Pracht at bigben+spam at videolan.org wrote:

> 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).


Ben,
thanks for the info.
looks like once again, Mac users are hosed from sharing content
with their PC bretheren, as many by default only know to
send along a WMV file, and not encode it to something else.

t.

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