Please do not shoot: ASF read support

[Scott Wheeler]

Umesh Shankar wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   I'm that guy that wanted WMA back in the day, and basically hacked 
> it up to get something working. Fortunately, there is a nicer 
> implementation that doesn't use mplayer sources and supports both 
> reading and writing (see 
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=taglib-devel&m=113365793626227&w=2).  It made 
> its way into Amarok: 
> http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&q=+lalinsk%3F+show:zeiX03IyRo0:usKRzNnyrIs:h9jy4mKXGIo&sa=N&cd=6&ct=rc&cs_p=ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/snapshots/kdeextragear-multimedia.tar.bz2&cs_f=kdeextragear-multimedia-585268/amarok/src/metadata/wma/wmatag.cpp#a0 
> .

Ah, right -- yes, that is indeed nice.  (I'd seen it before, but I 
always forget which patches were for what and don't have my annotated 
list here on my laptop).  And that clears away the implementation part.

That mostly leaves the legal side of things.  We've got a couple of 
lawyers that do pro-bono work for KDE; I'll try to see if I can get an 
opinion out of them on this one.  Does anyone actually know that the 
container was reverse engineered (and have a relevant link) or is just 
something that some guy said sometime?  (I'd like to include that detail 
if it goes off to the legal folks.)

> So really all that needs to be done is to package that up and 
> distribute it separately.
> Scott, it's been a long time but last time I tried to make a separable 
> package, I couldn't get it to work because there wasn't a registration 
> mechanism that could be reliably invoked without modifying Taglib. Has 
> that changed more recently? Are there successful add-ons that use this 
> mechanism?

I remember mentioning trying it with static initialization, but I also 
think I remember you saying that didn't work for some reason.  :-)

But still it's just a matter of the application developer using the 
external add-in to write one line of code in their app to pull it in.

-Scott