Talk:Restricted Formats

From openSUSE

This page should discuss the restricted formats, what they are, the alternative open formats.

It should discuss in general terms that there are open source projects that have support for these formats, and they are illegal in many countries. It is however legal in many countries to backup whatever you own.

This thread on the Mailing List archive is relevant. --Pflodo 23:53, 30 Aug 2005 (MDT)

HaakonME: To begin the argument, all the CDs I've bought in the last year have this file structure:

• CD
  • CDA directory
  • FLAC directory - an open and free format
  • Full CD directory
  • Information directory
  • MP3 directory
  • Ogg Vorbis directory - a open and free format
  • Track1.wav, Track2.wav and so on

This example is from Green Day punk rock album "American Idiot", which was nomineed in 6 Grammy award categories (album of the year amongst these), and won in at least one of those. The point I want to get across is that free formats are main stream. There is no need to support MP3, or any other old-fashioned, patent encumbered formats. The other popular OS may have to, but openSUSE and Novell does not. Norway is a very small country in the scale of things, but even our top sellers, like Ravi and DJ Løv have this file structure on their store bought CDs. It is therefore annoying that playback is not automatic in for instance the popular Amarok. MP3s are just files, so if you have an MP3 player and you have access to legally downloading such files from a music store or what ever, you can copy them to your MP3 player from your computer. Ask the music store to become main stream and sell Ogg and FLAC like Grammy winners does.

A correction here. The only music files present on those CDs are the *.wav files. Everything else you see (track info, FLAC, Ogg and MP3 directories) are psuedo-files presented to you by Konqueror. If the proper kioslaves and decoders/encoders are installed, you can rip a CD directly from Konqueror using drag and drop or the context menu from the (FLAC|MP3|Ogg) directories. If the cddb kioslave is installed, Konqueror will show track/album info.--Sjbcfh 04:21, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Listening to, editing or backing up music is not the only legitimate use of audio editors. Free software like Sweep and cross platform Audacity have a number of other uses. Sweep is - as far as I know - the only free software sound editor to support Speex, from www.speex.org. Speex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. It is used in IP phone solutions and video conferencing tools like GnomeMeeting. An uncompressed five minute sound file at CD quality is about 100 Mb. Compressed with Speex, it becomes about 1 Mb. I supply free audio books - that is Creative Commons Share-alike licensed Speex-files - of Norwegian folk tales at no cost from http://far.no/mediawiki-1.4.4/. This will be changed to just http://far.no/ before the end of December 2005. I fear ignorance will lead to people putting DMCA-locks on material that has never been copyrighted or that is not copyrighted any longer. In Norway this means all copyrighted works where the author died 75 years ago. Whether I'm right or wrong about this is irrelevant - the important thing is to use free codecs like Speex for audio books. It is therefore annoying that Sweep and Audacity is not provided by openSUSE, because they support proprietary sound codecs - for which there is no need any more as free formats are main stream, see above paragraph.

MP3 support via mad

Firstly we need to create a seperate wiki page (MP3_Support), which contains all the information about using MP3 with OpenSUSE, focusing on a user new to Linux and SuSE. I don't know a lot about legal issues. I use xmms-lib-mad and gstreamer-plugins-extra-mad, which I have installed using APT. Can we describe the procedure for installing/using these packages on this wiki? -- Nileshbansal 2005-11-29

No, because mp3 support has only been licensed via Real, so the helix-backend is the only "legal" (grey areas in countries where this doesn't apply, thus the quotes) method. Adding that information to the wiki would put Novell at legal risk.--CuCullin 21:21, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

putting supporting packages online

If there are legal problems with shipping packages that support restricted formats, can't we just put them in the online extras repository or over YOU like what was done before?

No, those are no longer done due to the legal issues surrounding the restricted formats. The recommended solution should remain to be the use of alternative open-source or patent-unencumbered formats. There is enough information available to add what is needed for those who aren't stuck in a country where these silly legalities exist.--CuCullin 21:23, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Would it be possible to provide the packages with a licence agreement saying that the user cannot install them in if they live in the problematic countries, the server could check the country of the user's ip address to enforce this.

Other no so restricted countries

What about those legal problems in countries whithout some of restrictions especially Europe is some plans to prepare a separate informations for those countries as Mandriva do??