Fwd: looking for phonon gstreamer maintainer

[Harald Sitter]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org> wrote:
> On 04 Oct, Daniel Vrátil wrote :
>> in Fedora we have a big interest in keeping phonon-gstreamer alive, namely
>> because we can't ship phonon-vlc due to legal issues (you know, US company,
>> software patents and what not...) and our users would not probably be very
>
> This is a bit untrue, tbh and at the limit of FUD.
>
> libVLC and libVLCcore are not more patent-encumbered than
> gstreamer-core.
>
> VLC, phonon-VLC and libVLC are based on modules loaded at runtime, like
> gstreamer, QT, DShow and other multimedia frameworks (a contrario from
> all-included players like mplayer)
> Shipping a version without problematic modules is very doable and has
> already been done.

FWIW rdieter and j-b were able to clear up the confusion on IRC and
apparently there now are plans to get vlc-without-patent-plugins into
Fedora \o/

For anyone who is interested...
libvlc* use $LIB/vlc/plugins/*/*.so to actually get
demuxers/decoders/etc. a reasonable amount of containers and codecs
(certainly some of the most important ones from a free software
distribution's POV) are supported by vlc native implementations
without usage of libav/ffmpeg/whatever. Any of the plugins can be
dropped, which will naturally reduce feature or format support, but
not impair libvlc's functionality at large. So a simple ldd check will
tell you which plugins to exclude to get an ffmpeg-free package.

^ This is also how one can get smaller monolithic phonon-vlc binary
packages BTW. Tomahawk for example strips a lot of the unused vlc
plugins from their windows and osx binaries to reduce the size.

HS