[Bf-committers] A question about blenders use of ffmpeg and grey area codecs

[Dave Plater lst]

I'm getting really tired of having to continually patch blender releases to pass the openSUSE / Novell legal review. I'm led to believe 
that if a program doesn't link against a patent or copyright challenged library then it isn't in danger of legal action. You can understand 
a company like Novell being a target for such legal action.
What I would like to know is what are the functions of the various xvid and ffmpeg sources/scripts. The python ones that I've glanced at 
seem to have the purpose of supplying parameters to ffmpeg.
I'm then going to pass this information to the legal department for clarification on whether I really have to remove these bits and patch 
blender to build without them or not.

Thanks
Dave Plater
Maintainer Blender in
openSUSE