Re: [Gnash] MP3 support

[Tomas Groth]

Hi,

> The best work-around we've figured out so far is to use the LGPL
> Gstreamer framework and a legal, patent-licensed MP3 plugin (proprietary
> of course) from Fluendo. The trick then is to create a free software
> Flash player that can pipe audio through Gstreamer to make use of the
> legal decoder plugin.  Now in theory this could be made to work with
> libswfdec, but it looks like Gnash could be a more up-to-date player. Do
> you think Gnash could be made to work with Gstreamer, and if so, could
> this cause a GPL problem piping through audio to a proprietary decoder?
> 

This should be relatively easy to get working, though i don't  know alot about
gstreamer myself, i image it isn't that hard to use. Personnally i'd prefer to
use ffmpeg directly for both video (videoframes and flv) and audio instead of
piping it through gstreamer, but that's just me...

> I see the long term solution as adding Ogg Vorbis support to the Flash
> specification. It sounds better than MP3 at low bitrates, and it's
> royalty-free - which is good news for Adobe since they don't own the
> main MP3 patents. Perhaps Gnash could lead the way by offering Vorbis
> support one day - then we'd have the chance of both creation and 
> playback tools which were both 100% free software and legally 
> redistributable.
> 

I agree that that would be great, but since the flash8 introduces another
proprietary video codec (vp6), i doubt that flash will be hit by the "open
standard wawe" anytime soon.

cheers,

Tomas