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

[Dave Plater lst]

On 03/20/2012 10:58 PM, Richard Shaw wrote:
> 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
>
>
What I'm looking for is an expert explanation of what the functions with mpeg, xvid and divx are actually for because I think, parts for 
linking in ffmpeg audio besides, they aren't a legal problem except for their names possibly.

By the way could you send me a link for your patch or source rpm please Richard, I've got a build error concerning missing variables atm.
Dave