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

[Richard Shaw]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Dave Plater lst <dplater.list at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/17/2012 01:09 AM, Campbell Barton wrote:
>> Do you have a link to the patches you're applying to blender?
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Dave Plater lst<dplater.list at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> 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.
> Which is not a legal problem, this is similar to what for example kde's kaffeine does with codecs.
>>> 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.

Here's the solution I came up with for 2.62. I modified the cmake
config using this patch[1] so that everything is handled by the
WITH_CODEC_FFMPEG cmake option. I think this patch should be
acceptable upstream and then you would only need to use the
DISTRIBUTABLE conditional in one place.

Thanks,
Richard

[1] http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34775202/blender-2.62-blenkernel.patch