Hi Jorge, this is of course a good idea. We will see what we can do in that regard. But be aware that commercial DVD players cost not only royalties, they cost a lot of royalties (for mpeg2, Dolby and CSS). And it needs to be well considered if we really want to pass all those costs to the customer. In my opinion the Turbolinux 10F is very expensive because of these royalties, you get 3 CDs and no manual at all for 70 bugs. Currently you get a SUSE Linux box for 60 bugs with 1 DVD, 5 CDs, a printed manual and 3 months installation support. But you're right, it's worth to think about that. A few more comments to your e-mail: mp3 decoder is already included in SL 10.0 (retail version). It's used by amarok, banshee and realplay to play mp3 files. PowerDVD is not the first legal DVD player for Linux, there are a few Linux OEM versions in the market that included LinDVD from Intervideo. MPlayer, Ogle and Xine are not illegal principally but using DeCSS with these players is illegal (not in some but in most countries). Martin On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
Hello everyone,
This question is mainly for the Novell employees watching this list:
What do you think about including "PowerDVD for Linux" on the box version? I'm using it now (got it from TurboLinux which I bought some months ago) and I think it's great. It's the first official (legal) DVD player for Linux.
I think it will be a great add-on to the retail version. I know it will cost you (licenses) but you can pass that on to the consumer. The same with an mp3 decoder? After all, for those that don't want to pay for these extra closed-source/non-free software, there's always the OSS version available.
BTW...I know there's Mplayer and Ogle out there that we can use for DVD playbay (although not legally in some countries)...I'm just curious about the PowerDVD possibility.
For the rest: comments are welcome :)
Thanks, Jorge
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