VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you’re not explicitly circumventing DRM there’s nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You’re licensing the code, not the method.
I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.
Could you imagine how much it would suck if VLC got bought out by corporate privateers?
Like the guy’s been putting a lot of work in for a long time, so I couldn’t exactly blame him for it, but we would need a fork immediately because otherwise that would just be too sad for words.
mpv exists so if vlc dies there’s just another reason to use linux.
Also dude has been approached and offered millions just for ad placement. I don’t think he’ll sell even if he’s dying or homeless. It’s a Terry Davis level of software development dedication at this point.
I think if it was bought it would be simply discontinued to force people to use their existing media player.
Also despite what people on tech forums think, probably 95% of people don’t even know what VLC or 7zip are and have never even heard of it. Of that 5% that have heard of it, maybe half use it.
What those drivers do is patented in the US. See MPEG licensing. VLC is based in the EU which does not have a mechanism for software patents that do not solve a physical problem (moving bits around isn’t patentable there) so they can avoid issues. Microsoft, Corel, and Nero would not be able to do that, they have assets in the US, even if it would only be a bank account.
I would not be surprised if codec licensing would not allow shipping with old and open codecs like MJPEG, Theora and AV1 with an addon for the proprietary codecs.
Probably, if they wanted to. The historical writing is on the wall that they don’t want to, though, as part of whatever their business strategy is. Fear of legal complications due to overtly being a for-profit commercial enterprise might also have something to do with it.
Microsoft is already quite infamous for e.g. going so far as to license third party .zip decompressing code to build into Windows Explorer rather than develop their own, code which apparently nobody in Redmond could be bothered to understand and thus to this very day the .zip archive handling capabilities of Explorer remain frozen and time from the XP era and so rinky-dink that they pale in comparison to commandline tools from the '90s. That’s let alone compared to something like 7-Zip.
This also raises the issue of having to maintain said code over subsequent releases and continually update it to support evolving standards, etc., which not only isn’t free but presents no obvious mechanism for extracting any revenue from anybody to offset that cost. The current plan of simply outsourcing the entire problem to its rightsholders and passing the licensing cost directly to the consumer allows Microsoft to handily wash their hands of the entire affair, enabling them to devote more resources to trying to shoehorn Copilot AI into the character map or the registry editor, or whatever the fuck.
microsoft publishing a free version of the paid codec would rightly be considered anticompetitive business practices due to their market position. VLC not so much.
I don’t think this is true or ffmpeg wouldn’t keep the proprietary codecs in a separate branch with no binary download. If you want a compiled ffmpeg binary with mp3, you need to download it from a 3rd party.
That’s good to know that it’s been updated but the reason it wasn’t in the default binaries until the patent expired was because “it’s free” isn’t a defense from being sued by a patent holder.
Vlc including patented codecs is getting away with it despite the sword hanging over the project. Ffmpeg prefers to be safe because many free OpenSource projects have been shut down by patent holders.
Something only becomes an intellectual property (intangible) asset if there is a law that says that said specific kind of thing can be intellectual property - the whole domain is an entirely artificial creation and there is no such thing as natural intellectual property.
So whilst French and EU do have the concept of intangible assets, it’s irrelevant here because software patents aren’t intellectual property according that those laws and hence are not “assets” and are thus not covered by such laws.
Question: how does VLC get away with playing these proprietary codecs without compensating the owners of them?
Short answer: many have no licensing requirements for playback, only encoding. Sales are easy when you have a good codec that everyone can watch.
VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you’re not explicitly circumventing DRM there’s nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You’re licensing the code, not the method.
I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.
Could you imagine how much it would suck if VLC got bought out by corporate privateers?
Like the guy’s been putting a lot of work in for a long time, so I couldn’t exactly blame him for it, but we would need a fork immediately because otherwise that would just be too sad for words.
videolan itself is a nonprofit, formed around the time of the 1.0 release of vlc.
mpv exists so if vlc dies there’s just another reason to use linux.
Also dude has been approached and offered millions just for ad placement. I don’t think he’ll sell even if he’s dying or homeless. It’s a Terry Davis level of software development dedication at this point.
I think if it was bought it would be simply discontinued to force people to use their existing media player.
Also despite what people on tech forums think, probably 95% of people don’t even know what VLC or 7zip are and have never even heard of it. Of that 5% that have heard of it, maybe half use it.
Does Microsoft not have anyone capable of reverse engineering these drivers too? Isn’t it in their best interest to also broaden compatibility?
What those drivers do is patented in the US. See MPEG licensing. VLC is based in the EU which does not have a mechanism for software patents that do not solve a physical problem (moving bits around isn’t patentable there) so they can avoid issues. Microsoft, Corel, and Nero would not be able to do that, they have assets in the US, even if it would only be a bank account.
I would not be surprised if codec licensing would not allow shipping with old and open codecs like MJPEG, Theora and AV1 with an addon for the proprietary codecs.
Can’t charge a markup on Free.
Probably, if they wanted to. The historical writing is on the wall that they don’t want to, though, as part of whatever their business strategy is. Fear of legal complications due to overtly being a for-profit commercial enterprise might also have something to do with it.
Microsoft is already quite infamous for e.g. going so far as to license third party .zip decompressing code to build into Windows Explorer rather than develop their own, code which apparently nobody in Redmond could be bothered to understand and thus to this very day the .zip archive handling capabilities of Explorer remain frozen and time from the XP era and so rinky-dink that they pale in comparison to commandline tools from the '90s. That’s let alone compared to something like 7-Zip.
This also raises the issue of having to maintain said code over subsequent releases and continually update it to support evolving standards, etc., which not only isn’t free but presents no obvious mechanism for extracting any revenue from anybody to offset that cost. The current plan of simply outsourcing the entire problem to its rightsholders and passing the licensing cost directly to the consumer allows Microsoft to handily wash their hands of the entire affair, enabling them to devote more resources to trying to shoehorn Copilot AI into the character map or the registry editor, or whatever the fuck.
microsoft publishing a free version of the paid codec would rightly be considered anticompetitive business practices due to their market position. VLC not so much.
I don’t think this is true or ffmpeg wouldn’t keep the proprietary codecs in a separate branch with no binary download. If you want a compiled ffmpeg binary with mp3, you need to download it from a 3rd party.
ffmpeg binaries from pretty much anyone should have libmp3lame baked-in. the format was ‘freed’ from the last patent in 2017.
That’s good to know that it’s been updated but the reason it wasn’t in the default binaries until the patent expired was because “it’s free” isn’t a defense from being sued by a patent holder.
Vlc including patented codecs is getting away with it despite the sword hanging over the project. Ffmpeg prefers to be safe because many free OpenSource projects have been shut down by patent holders.
French law and European law don’t have the concept of software patents, so there’s no basis to sue VLC.
do they have the concept of intangible assets?
Something only becomes an intellectual property (intangible) asset if there is a law that says that said specific kind of thing can be intellectual property - the whole domain is an entirely artificial creation and there is no such thing as natural intellectual property.
So whilst French and EU do have the concept of intangible assets, it’s irrelevant here because software patents aren’t intellectual property according that those laws and hence are not “assets” and are thus not covered by such laws.
Maybe it’s because they’re not selling their product? I don’t know though, just guessing.