Have you anted up $2.50 for VLC?
I would gather some of this group use VLC (or something similar to it that might be affected). Apparently, there's an unapparent cost:
It's the first time I've heard of this minor payment, which you wouldn't really know about unless you were digging around in the VLC Frequently Asked Questions. Granted, this kind of issue is a small scale compared to what could happen if an issue about say, libdvdcss, wound up in court (can we say triple damages?).
In the meantime, I'll write MPEG LA a check for $2.50 assuming they can actually explain to me what's going on (reading some of those license agreements is probably akin to major surgery without the anesthesia).
What about personal/commercial usage?
Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are mostly the MPEG style codecs.
With many products the producer pays the license body (in this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because they are Free and Open Source implementations of these codecs. The software is not sold and therefore the end-user becomes responsible for complying to the licensing and royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor on how to comply to these licenses.
This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal joy ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the Internet.
It's the first time I've heard of this minor payment, which you wouldn't really know about unless you were digging around in the VLC Frequently Asked Questions. Granted, this kind of issue is a small scale compared to what could happen if an issue about say, libdvdcss, wound up in court (can we say triple damages?).
In the meantime, I'll write MPEG LA a check for $2.50 assuming they can actually explain to me what's going on (reading some of those license agreements is probably akin to major surgery without the anesthesia).
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posted by weather boy at
6:07 PM
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1 comments
