[Mageia-dev] gstreamer0.10-faac - package request

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and jpbfree at 19/06/12 12:54 did gyre and gimble:
> On 19/06/2012 13:26, Oliver Burger wrote:
>> Am 19.06.2012 13:21, schrieb Simple w:
>>> 2012/6/19 Sander Lepik<sander.lepik at eesti.ee>:
>>>> 19.06.2012 03:29, Philippe DIDIER kirjutas:
>>>>> Nevertheless, until it's done and good there's no solution to work on
>>>>> mp4 or mpa or aac files with Mageia2 ... and certainly won't either
>>>>> with Mageia3 ... people who need that will go elsewhere.
>>>> Well, we really can't hold them back. Can we? :)
>>>
>>> Yes we could :)
>>>
>>> We would just need to add these packages. I see that Mageia developers
>>> want to do things correct, but listen this, i have installed
>>> Linuxmint 13 Cinnamon (that uses also ubuntu repos) and i have not
>>> added any new repos and i have faac available to install.
>>>
>>> Couldnt developers in mageia put these kind of packages simply in
>>> non-free repository (at least until isnt found a better solution) ?
>>
>> No! We do know, others (Ubuntu in this case) do not care about such
>> legal/licensing issues, but we do.
>> So only because someone else does jump off a building do you jump as
>> well?
>>
>> Oliver
>>
> Hum; we can also have another viewpoint:
> So only because some countries have strange laws about patents and
> copywright the rest of the planet should follow-on!
> 
> just a constatation; not pointing at or bashing anyone.

Without wanting to complain, this has been discussed several times before.

We do support installing things that have patent issues. THis is the
whole point of the "tainted" repository. You can do this if you like.

However we also want to ensure that people who care about Free Software
are also catered for, so anything that is distributed under a non-free
licence is shipped in the non-free repository.

The problem specifically with faac is that it is both non-free *AND*
tainted.

AFAIK, this is the only bit of software that we even half way want to
ship that falls into this category. As it's unmaintained and old, I do
not think that setting up a fourth repository (and when we setup up a
fourth repository it's actually five more internally: release, updates,
updates_testing, backports, backports_testing)

Doing this is a lot of work.

For one package, I personally feel we've got better things to spend our
time on. For the handful of people that really want this package, they
can rebuild it themselves. There are enough guides out there detailing
how to do this.

I think it is a far better strategy generally that the effort that could
have been spend implementing and supporting this very special case would
rather be focussed on ensuring that the ffmpeg aac encoding support
works as needed and port applications relying on the faac to use ffmpeg
instead. It does seem to be under active development:
http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=history;f=libavcodec/aacenc.c;hb=HEAD

The latest ffmpeg was released just a few days ago. Has anyone actually
investigated the aac encoding capabilities it has?

This is the most recent discussion I could find:
http://ffmpeg-users.933282.n4.nabble.com/Choosing-between-experimental-libavcodec-aac-or-faac-encoders-td4347417.html

Seems like it would be very much worth looking at the native ffmpeg one IMO.

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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