Hi,

Marcus Meissner wrote:

...

They did talk to each other. I do not know the contract, or the real result, but was told to me is that it would cost us per-copy royalties.

If I remember correctly (I once had an IRC chat with someone with Real), the Windows codec licence provider (Microsoft?) requires that the download of every copy is recorded. That happens if you go to the Real / Helixplayer webpage and click "download": You get a unique URL for downloading it. Thus one seemingly cannot put the Real Player a normal FTP player. There might be additionally a per-copy royalty problem, I don't know. In principle, it should be possible to create a package which does not the Windows codecs, but one can also simply drop the package on the openSUSE side and every user can download it (also as RPM) from: https://player.helixcommunity.org/2005/downloads (Using the real.com site is also possible.) Wolfgang Woehl wrote:

Do I understand you right that if Real would have been less greedy opensuse would have happily kept on shipping this piece of last- century/phone-home/let's-squeeze-some-ads-in-there crap and associating .mp3 and .ogg and what-not to it?

I don't think that's the problem - I have not found the Linux version very intrusive (contrary to the Windows version) and most code of the Real Player is also released under the GPL (except of the core: The codecs, which would arguably most useful under an open source release). I hope that with browsers such as Firefox and Opera supporting HTML5's <video> and <audio>, the OGG/Theora format will get more widely used by content providers; currently one has essentially only the choice between MP3, WMA/WMV, Real, Quicktime or Flash - which have all licence or codec availability problems. Fortunately, at least OGG audio files/streams have already got some market share. Tobias, who is neither affiliated with Novell/SUSE nor with Real -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org