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Re: Media player software for linux?
On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 10:31:07AM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2001, Alon Altman wrote about "Re: Media player software for linux?":
> > On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > > Isn't a dll the equivalent of a library? Then how can it use a collection of
> > > objects made for another OS?
> >
> > Just like "avifile" does it, using code from wine. Both OSs run on the
> > same architecture, so the wine code simply simulates the other OS's system
> > calls, so the DLL code thinks it's under the other OS.
>
> Besides, it would seem to me that those "codec" libraries are all about doing
> mathematical calculations, and need to do very few (if any) system calls.
> They probably shouldn't do any file access, graphics, and so on (the
> application reads the files, passes blocks of data for the codec routine to
> decode, and later displays the data returned by the codec). You still need
> code to find routines in a Windows DLL, but I expect that actually running
> them is much simpler than a general "WINE" which emulates all the Windows
> system calls, graphic APIs, and so on.
>
> Of course, I haven't actually looked at the code of mplayer and its lookalikes,
> so I might be wrong.
>
> What I don't understand is why mplayer needs to run Windows DLL codecs. Where
> are these codecs coming from? Are they "pirated" from some commercial
> application? If not, why can't somebody compile them for Linux natively?
It doesn't have to be piracy, it can be legal fair use. If you
legally own a copy of a Windows player, whether or not you have
Windows itself, nobody is stopping you from using its DLLs in any
way you like.
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