On Saturday 12 November 2005 23:27, Leo Mauler wrote:
Someone on another forum lambasted my suggestion that the XviD video codec would play on any Linux machine by saying that most distros didn't come with MP3 support, making a lot of XviD videos play in Linux with no sound.
XviD is not MP3. Generally, XviD is paired up with Vorbis, so it's not even a safe assumption that an XviD encoded video would use MP3... so the whole debate is irrelevant to your suggestion. Of course, I wouldn't suggest XviD-- ffmpeg's MP4 encoder is better.
I went looking and of course he's right, Debian and Ubuntu don't have it for obvious licensing reasons, Redhat pulled support for MP3 back in version 8.0 and never put it back. Mandriva still includes support for MP3s.
I think the lack of MP3 support is more of a lecture on using Vorbis instead of MP3 than anything else.
What exactly is the official policy on MP3s? Is there an unwritten policy thats sort of <nudge, nudge, wink, wink> regarding allowing free software MP3 decoders/encoders?
I think there's a written licensing policy that MP3 is licensed for any non-commercial use.