Free Software Linux

Don’t misunderstand me, as I’m not preaching the value of proprietary codecs. Despite Theora's shortcomings with rendering speed and overall playback quality in comparison to proprietary alternatives, this does not mean that all open source codecs are loosing ground in the fight for your video viewing freedom.

Ubuntu's founder tries to defend inclusion Microsoft codecs, but misses a broader picture.

The mobile version of Ubuntu appears to be passing money to Microsoft, which has an effect on redistribution rights as well

The mobile version of Ubuntu appears to be passing money to Microsoft, which has an effect on redistribution rights as well

"...As some of you Neuros old timers may recall, we were the first to port the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to a portable HDD audio player. Now it's time, hopefully, to do the same with the Ogg Theora video codec..."

here are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision. And in a recent article, I took this whole idea to task and examine how it may not actually be illegal to use libdvdcss after all.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.