Legal proprietary codecs usage on Ubuntu Linux Options

[ZinCh]

Gerry Carr has announced on the Canonical Blog that Fluendo and CyberLink will now be selling their multimedia wares through the Canonical Store. Fluendo is the company supporting the development of GStreamer and they sell several proprietary codecs for providing a legal media playback experience on Linux. Among these codecs are Windows Media, MPEG2, and MPEG4. CyberLink on the other hand is selling their PowerDVD software for Ubuntu.

Fluendo's Windows Media and MP3 codecs for GStreamer can be purchased for about $25 USD to enable legal Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Video, Windows Media MMS, Windows Media ASF Demuxer, and MP3 Audio decoding. Their complete codec pack, which adds MPEG2, MPEG4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, MPEG2 Program Stream and Transport Stream, AAC, and MPEG4 ISO costs about $40 USD.

CyberLink's PowerDVD for Linux enables the legal video playback of commercial DVD movies. The Linux version of PowerDVD also has Dolby Digital Audio support as well as for remote controls. This proprietary software will set you back $50 USD as a digital download through the Canonical Shop.

canonical via phoronix

[yourlord]

I could sit down with a pencil and paper and do the calculations to encode and then decode a given set of digital audio samples.. It might take me my entire life to do it for 10 seconds of audio, but it's just doing a lot of math. Using a computing tool to speed up the process does not make doing math patentable.