Look what’s coming…

Fluendo engineers have been busy preparing that :

Fluendo DVD player on OpenSolaris 

It’s a matter of days now before it appears on our web store :)

14 Responses to “Look what’s coming…”

  1. Anonymous Says:

    Does this represent a custom proprietary DVD player, or (hopefully) a standard player using standard technologies covered by throwing protection racket money towards the DVD-CCA?

  2. dolphy Says:

    It’s a player using standard technologies, MPEG2, AC3, CSS decryption and authentication, GTK, DBUS, GStreamer.

    Some parts of it are opensource, patent licenses are paid so that it’s legal to ship and use all around the world.

    And yes it’s a proprietary application, ie not Free Software as per the FSF definitions.

  3. DarwinSurvivor Says:

    Will it play bluray? So far that’s the only part of my laptop linux can’t take advantage of yet :(

  4. Anonymous Says:

    Why yet another media player? Linux have already tones of DVD players, even proprietary.
    Why isn’t it just a proprietary gstream plugin I can pay to play DVD in totem legaly?

    tbh, I won’t pay for it anyway, it is already legal in EU, AFAIK.

  5. Corey Burger Says:

    Is cool beans, but a Totem plugin would have been much better. Going down the Windows/OS X route of millions of media players installed is by default is not exactly a major win for usability. And yes, I understand that licensing probably prevents this.

  6. dolphy Says:

    A totem plugin is not a viable choice. Do you know how many combinations of Totem player versions and GStreamer versions we would have to support ? Each one would behave differently for this very complex topic that is DVD playback. This would be a pure nightmare.

    On top of that a Totem plugin would output video frames and audio samples to untrusted components making it impossible to comply with the licensing agreements required to distribute such a software legally.

    No really, this has to be a monolithic player shipping its own GStreamer, its own codecs, etc…

  7. Fabian Says:

    I guess it means they ported their proprietary player, which was release a while ago for Linux, to opensolaris.

  8. ... Says:

    I wish you the best, even though I probably won’t buy it. One question: How is DVD menu navigation done? libdvdnav, or a custom library?

  9. ... Says:

    I wish you the best, even though I probably will not buy it. One question: How is DVD menu navigation realized? With libdvdnav, or with a custom library?

  10. Tim Says:

    Looks cool, but I can’t see anyone using this over VLC/mplayer/xine/etc which have played DVDs fine for years.

    Bluray support would make it more enticing.

  11. Pierre-Luc Beaudoin Says:

    Does it really use both cores (I assume you have a dual core machine) at 100%? :)

  12. dolphy Says:

    Pierre: hehe, no it’s a old Centrino 1.6 GHz and this is a debug version so it takes a lot of CPU indeed.

    Regarding the navigation library question, this is our own.

  13. dherman Says:

    Congratulations on the upcoming release. Don’t know whether I will buy it right away, but (if I ever get a job) I would definitely consider it,
    because…

    I appreciate the efforts Fluendo has made on behalf of non-mac/windows users everywhere, be those efforts proprietary or not.

  14. Richad Says:

    Congratulations on a Solaris release, then, I guess.

    I do still hope that someone is working on a US-legal licensing solution so I can watch my property on my own OS. License agreements that restrict outputting of audio/video to “untrusted” components seems somewhat futile or redundant. It’s like putting a tollbooth on a road that already has numerous detours around it. It just makes it impossible for people to enjoy their property with Free Software legally :(