Feature added by: Stanislav Brabec (sbrabec) Feature #306462, revision 1, last change by Title: Evaluate distributability of MPEG container codecs openSUSE-11.2: New Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Stanislav Brabec (sbrabec) Description: Due to uncertain legal status of MPEG stream and transport stream format decoders, its implementation is not part of our products. It would be nice to evaluate its legal status and make possible to decode MPEG2/4 videos using free video and audio codecs, for example Dirac video. Decoding a video requires finding of synchronization points (transport stream decoding, for a stream broadcasting) demultiplexing (stream decoding), then decoding video (passing video sub-stream to the video codec) and audio (passing sound sub-stream to the sound codec). It is known, that video codecs for MPEG-2/4 are part of MPEG LA (http://www.mpegla.com/) patent portfolio. It is known, that audio codecs for MPEG-2/4 are part of VIA Licensing (http://www.vialicensing.com/) and Thomson (http://mp3licensing.com/) patent portfolios. Legal status of the stream operations (transport stream synchronization, multiplexing and demultiplexing) is not known. It may be covered by some patents, but it is possible that there are no patents covering the stream container formats. References: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=483592 -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306462