[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

[Florian Hubold]

Am 21.09.2011 10:52, schrieb Oliver Burger:
> 2011/9/21 Florian Hubold<doktor5000 at arcor.de>:
>> Am 21.09.2011 02:14, schrieb Philippe DIDIER:
>>> Anssi Hannula wrote /Tue Sep 20 17:29:44/ :
>>>> Including faac itself is no less safe than other patent-encumbered
>>>> codecs, since the non-free parts do not forbid redistribution.
>>> The only non-free and non GPL part of FAAC is the ISO MPEG reference code
>>> which
>>> it is based on... to comply with this international standard (nothing
>>> strange in that)
>>> everything else is LGPL .
>>> An international standard may not be modified,  for sure, and is surely
>>> not GPL !
>>> And for this reason we may consider FAAC as non-free...
>>>
>>> Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a
>>> proprietary encoder
>>> (like NERO aac encoder that can't be distribuable... and is surely not GPL
>>> !)
>> This is simply not true, there is vo-aacenc and there is also ffaac, both
>> from ffmpeg.
> If there are alternatives to faac I strongly suggest, not adding faac
> to any of our repos, after all, we are using and providing
> OpenSource-Software and should follow its philosophy.
> If others don't care about it, we still should.
>
> Oliver
>
AFAIK, the output quality of ffaac is not quite good and it's in experimental 
state.
For vo-aacenc, it's a different problem, for now it doesn't even support
direct encoding of 5.1/7.1 audio it only does downmix it to 2.0 stereo.

We would have replaced bundled faac in handbrake, if there wouldn't have
been those restrictions, and also as faac is default encoder and
fallback alternative in many scenarios, so there may be bugs due to that.

For other packages this may still be an option if it's only about encoding
music tracks or something the like.