[OLPC library] [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)

[Rob Savoye]

Charbax wrote:

> filmed myself, I can encode a version in Ogg Theora I think, though is there
> a way to automatically stream Ogg Theora in full screen on the olpc laptop?

  The simplest way I know is to write a 5 line Flash program to load the
file from disk and play it. If you use Gnash, it'll "just work".

> I hope gnash will work sometime soon, with some ways to playback Youtube and
> all other flash video sites in full screen and smoothly. There is no other

  Gnash has supported "YouTube", and other video sites (not all) for
over a year, and we also support a -fullscreen option. My own builds of
Gnash for the XO work reasonably well, but due to patent laws, I can't
redistribute those builds. The other problem becomes the libraries we
depend on, like Gstreamer, change frequently, so Gnash breaks often
after upgrades. So most people just assume Gnash is incredibly far from
even working at all, which is far from reality.

> theora encoded videos and all that. I just think that perhaps OLPC would be
> a good way to put pressure on the established software patent holders, so
> that they stop blocking Linux from having good, smooth, legal access to what
> have become web standards for video codecs such as flash video and Mpeg4,
> VOIP such as Skype, audio codecs such as Mp3, website design such as flash
> animations. Proprietary formats that have become so popular on the web need
> to be opened up by new laws and regulation or by popular pressure on those
> companies that purposefully block interoperability on those certain
> features.

  I've recently formed a new 501c6 non-profit to do exactly this. While
continuing to work on Gnash, and emphasize patent free codecs, we also
plan to pursue other means of legally decoding proprietary formats. We
already can support the proprietary codecs using ffmpeg, but would like
to deal with the patent issue in a legal way. Fluendo has done this,
Redhat is trying to negotiate a way to do this now, so maybe we can too...

  Our hope is that we can raise sufficient funding through our new
organization to not only accelerate the progress of Gnash, but to work
on the legal and political aspects as well. Those of us that develop
free software have special concerns, and as far as I can tell, there is
nobody else trying to improve the situation for us all. So we're going
to try... So if people want to see this situation improve, please
support us in this task. (insert generic fund raising plea here)

	- rob -
http://www.openmedianow.org