VLC media player

Apparently some GPL code written by Jon and me can be found in Sony’s XCP DRM software. I have not been able to confirm this by myself (I went through the EFF’s list of Sony-BMG XCP-encumbered discs and The Dead 60s’ album seemed worth buying, ... [More] but the only copy I could find in France is distributed by Deltasonic Records 2002 and did not go through Sony-BMG’s hands). I will however assume that the disassembly chunks published here and there are genuine, though this is something anyone in their right mind should check more thoroughly before blindly copying the information from blog to blog. By the way, if anyone owns such a CD that they are willing to give away or sell, I am interested in owning at least one of them. Is there really VLC code in XCP? The short answer is yes. I have little doubt that the code is a derivative of VLC’s drms.c. The idea of ROT13’ing the Apple copyright string was Jon’s, and I know of no other clean-room reimplementation of Apple’s DRM. However, it could pretty well be the code of another application that itself uses the drms.c code. It is virtually impossible to track the usage of GPL code, so the code in XCP could come from anywhere. And that other application could or could not violate the GPL, we have no idea either. The only ones who could enlighten us are First4Internet. Is it a GPL infringement? The first question that absolutely anyone should ask before drawing conclusions is: “are the code copying and redistribution terms really done without the authors’ consent?”. No one should ever assume anything about what Jon and I do with our code without making sure we did not relicense it to third parties under different terms. But just to reassure everyone: I did not relicense any code from VLC under a non-GPL license. Sony’s “evilness” Again, we have no idea who the real culprit is, so do not draw conclusions too early. It could be: Sony-BMG, by buying GPLed code from First4Internet and redistributing it without complying with the GPL. First4Internet, by selling GPLed code to Sony-BMG under a different license. Absolutely anyone else, distributing VLC’s GPLed code under a different license, that somehow found its way to First4Internet. And unless they were heavily trolling, I would like to publicly laugh at the Slashdork who decided not to buy a PS3 because of this story involving Sony. As if Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Nintendo’s Revolution deserved it more. The Apple copyright string Just to make sure no one accuses Sony of violating Apple’s copyright, here is a copy of a comment I did on Slashdot about the presence of the ROT13’d string "copyright (c) Apple Computer, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.": I have to make sure everyone understands why this string is here. To be fair with Sony (or whoever they mandated), it is not an attempt from them to hide the code theft. Rather, it is an attempt by Apple to prevent not only code theft but also clean-room reimplementations. Apple’s encryption scheme includes the generation of a key. The important parts of this key come from the machine’s unique hardware information. But to prevent (at least that’s my only plausible explanation for it) people from reimplementing the scheme by using the same information, they also add this copyright string to the key generation. Reimplementing their protocol means the string has to be used. We just store it ROT13’ed in VLC because it would be confusing to have an Apple copyright in our code. Although technically the string itself is created by Apple, it is too short to qualify for copyright. Why do Sony’s CDs need to unscramble Apple’s iTune music? I don’t think they need to do that. I think they just needed a free or low-cost media or music player shipped with their CD, and either VLC or some other software happened to fill the gap. The drms.c code just happened to be in there and no one bothered to remove it. What now? For those who expect hot sweaty action now, I am afraid I may disappoint you. The whole affair already gives Sony a very bad name, it raises public awareness of the dangers of stealth DRM and of the “respect our IP because we’re bigger than you, but we fuck with your IP because we’re bigger than you” doublespeak. Lawsuits, or even large, friendly lawyer letters written in all caps, require money, time and energy. And I do not have any of these to waste. I prefer getting money from people who like what I do rather than from people whose doings I don’t like. [Less]

Went hiking in Mount Tamalpais this weekend.

We have asked for donations in the past in order to assist us in developing for the Mac OS X platform. Now all of a sudden we had to return our Xserve machine, which was doing the daily nightly builds and the buildbod commit checks. So we cut to the ... [More] chase and bought ourselves a Powermac G5 1.8 Ghz Dual Processor machine. It's standing at my apartment atm and I'm working on setting it up as the new buildserver. The G5 is lovely and really fast. HDTV is a breeze with this machine. After we set it up as the new server, and as soon as I have a TOS cable etc, I will start working on improved Digital Audio support for VLC OSX, and then i made give Video Capture a try, since I know also own an iBot firewire webcam. I'm not making any promises, but I think I should be able to get something usable soon. [Less]

As reported on tuaw.com, Phil Windley has created a script to automatically convert Tivo (or other MPEG2 sources) into iPod G5 compatible MPEG4 video files.

Hi all, it's been a long time since my last posting unfortunately. The latest news however is that I will be on the Radioshow Track21. This show is targeted at students in and around Enschede (where I live) and is broadcasted by a Local radiostation. ... [More] It will be live and will begin around 19:50 CET. The subject is going to be VideoLAN and how it grew from a student pet-project into a full blown Open Source Community. The interview is due to an article in the magazine SUM where my name was apparently mentioned in an article concerning VideoLAN. [Less]

Meuuh and I eventually took over libmpeg2, in a totally friendly way. Our first job will be to review every patch that was submitted in the last 18 months. The biggest work will be, as with libdvdcss, to deal with MPlayer’s usual inability to split a patch into functional subsets.

The VLC 0.8.2 downloads counter is currently at 9,775,000 and he increasing by about 1.5 per second. This means we should cross the 10 millions line on Monday. VLC 0.8.2 was released on June, 26th, so this will make about 3 months and a half. Far ... [More] from Firefox statistics, of course, but quite encouraging anyway. This is by far the most successful VLC release ever (ok, this is also the first one for which we have kept very accurate statistics). It's great to see that the popularity of VLC is still increasing steadily. VLC has gotten quite some press attention recently, especially in France with the FreePlayer by french ISP Free, but also worldwide, with Google Video for example. We are also featured on more download websites (and VLC is now the #6 most popular software on Freshmeat !) You probably have noticed that we released VLC 0.8.4-test1, the first test release for the upcoming 0.8.4 release. We hope to release -test2 very soon now, and we expect to release VLC 0.8.4 by the end of October. This would make 4 months since the last release. It is an improvement on the latest releases, but not very successful in our goal of shortening release cycles. This goal has become quite important for us, after the very long delays we experienced to get 0.8.0 and 0.8.2 out (0.8.1 was a quick bugfix release). We have quite succeeded in getting the features in the SVN at the time we wanted, but we should now work on improving our focus on releasing once this step is done. The Trac we use has proven to be very helpful here, and we recently set up buildbot that manages our continuous integration and nightly builds, allowing us to improve bug fixes (especially for architecture-specific bugs) Anyway, I guess we should celebrate somehow. Any idea ? [Less]

I'm going to IBC tomorrow. Ticket was free, and there should be quite some interesting stuff to see there. Jean Paul and Sigmund will be attending as well, and the guys from our very own spinoff company anevia even have a stand (#1.444). Hopefully, I ... [More] can spread the word on VLC a bit more (I'll be wearing my VideoLAN T-shirt). So I was watching the news this evening, and on channel RTL4 there is this item about gadgets on IBC. And guess what? First gadget they show is a WinCE device running VLC media player for WinCE !!!! Now THAT is wicked stuff. You can see the clip here (MMS). [Less]

With a lot of popularity, comes more and more publicity it seems. Everything our friend Jon does get blown out of proportions of course. This is one of the reasons Jon only talks to a very limited set of journalists anymore. Lets take the latest ... [More] example of cracking the NSC encoding. Jon only talked to The Register about this. Unfortunatly they got a little bit too enthousiastic, and missed the point somewhat this time. Now it's funny how much such an article gets copied. Almost all other articles blindly copied this. What is truly funny though is that friday late afternoon, I got a call on my cell...: "Good day, I'm looking for an interview with mr. Jon Lech Johansen". Right, how did this fellow get my number? Well, my website is named in Jon's Blog article on NSC. And my website is on my domain, which is registered on my name, and the registration has my phone number of course (Scary....). I explained that Jon is very difficult to reach, and that I would relay the message to Jon. We got talking a bit about the project, and he asked me some questions, and before I knew it I was giving an interview. The article is online now, and I specifically tried to correct some of the wild ideas that had grown in the online community about this NSC thing. It's a pretty decent article, with only a very few small errors. Then there was carp.nl. A Dutch magazine that wanted an interview with us. They visited Antoine in Paris, and did a telephone interview with me. The article is now on page 22 of their latest issue (#13). It shows a bit about the culture of the VideoLAN project and makes for quite a nice read. Not always 100% accurate about the more technical things, but if you don't know a thing about Video or FOSS, you won't notice, care or be misinformed. Great publicity beyond our usual online attention. Let's hope it gets the word out even more. It's nice that we are clearly making a stir beyond our own little circle. VLC is getting more popular. Lets hope we can all keep up, for we are not FireFox. [Less]

Framakey is a french project to have a set of free software (for Windows) on an USB key. The software can be run directly from the key, without any risk for the system they are run on. The goal is to allow people who can't install anything on their ... [More] computers (in compagnies, for example) to run free software anyway. VLC 0.8.2 has been included on the Framakey, along with OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, Thunderbird, CoolPlayer (audio player), Scite (text editor) and Abiword You can either download the software packages to copy them on your own USB key (256 MB at least for the complete version, 128 MB without OpenOffice), or buy a pre-installed key from Framakey. This initiative looks very interesting for nomad users who want to have free software everywhere. [Less]