First Release Of Open-Source Blu-Ray Library

[Teho]

I would also like to remind that VLC is relatively small project. Even though donations are imporant they are not essential like in the case of Wikileaks that needs millions a year to operate properly. Donations to VLC aren't paid as salaries to anyone.

What are the financial needs of VideoLAN?
Buy hardware for developing and testing purposes (DVDs, satellite cards and antenna, MPEG encoding cards,...)
Maintain the servers and hardware to run VideoLAN services.
Promote the project by organising or participating in events (FOSDEM, Linux Expo Paris, ...)

https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html#money

[DeepDayze]

When SOPA passes (and some form of it will), the United States will probably attack VLC through the ITA and do a wikileak's style defunding blockade by not allowing credit card, paypal, etc. donations to VLC. we'll see if this is an "American" problem then.

Cash in mail donations will still work as the VLC people will deposit the cash into a French bank. No way the USA can stop people from mailing cash to even Wikileaks.

SOPA is a crock...USA people should write to their bonehead congresspeople to LISTEN and STOP this madness from passing.

[popper]

I need it for makemkv and mplayer to rip/play BD...



Works fine for months already.

yeah makemkv is really good for a beta product for simply and quickly getting your DVD/BR content into a single usable MKV form with mpeg2/h264, AAC, and subs etc all in the single mkv container for later ffmpeg processing or even direct real time LAN ( or WAN if you have that kind of upload rate) streaming with that included functionality

[popper]

When SOPA passes (and some form of it will), the United States will probably attack VLC through the ITA and do a wikileak's style defunding blockade by not allowing credit card, paypal, etc. donations to VLC. we'll see if this is an "American" problem then.

what!
you really should try keeping up with current world news you know.... the key points just for you DaemonFC

"the European Parliament has adopted a resolution against SOPA"
"Update: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has spoken out against SOPA. Update II: Tumbler's anti-SOPA message on their website generated almost 90000 (!) phone calls to representatives. Amazing."

"the European Parliament has adopted a resolution against SOPA

. Technically,

the resolution

stresses the importance of - among other things - "the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names".

The resolution is directed at the United States, and while SOPA is not mentioned, it's pretty clear what the European Parliament is referring to.

In addition, the European Parliament also adopted a resolution stating that net neutrality should be part of EU law. True, unconditional net neutrality currently only exists in Chile (first!) and The Netherlands (second!), but if it would be enshrined in EU law, it would become part of many, many more European countries...."

http://www.osnews.com/story/25345

posted by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th Nov 2011 23:20 UTC

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/european-high-court-rejects-internet-traffic-filtering-as-violation-of-fundamental-rights.ars
"European high court rejects Internet traffic filtering as violation of fundamental rights

By Sean Gallagher | Published 16 days ago
While Thanksgiving is an American holiday, internet service providers and users in Europe had reason to give thanks yesterday.

The highest court in the European Union overturned a ruling that would have forced a Belgian ISP to preemptively filter Internet traffic to prevent the unauthorized sharing of music files.

The European Court of Justice overturned a ruling by a Belgian court in a suit brought by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM). SABAM filed it against Scarlet Extended over alleged illegal peer-to-peer filesharing by Scarlet's customers. That 2007 ruling required Scarlet to filter traffic on its network, so that it could identify and block illegal peer to peer filesharing traffic. It was based on an interpretation of Belgian copyright laws that put the burden of enforcement on ISPs. ....."
....
"... In its ruling, The Court of Justice upheld the right of copyright holders to file injunctions against intermediaries over illegal file sharing. But it struck down the provisions of the Belgian court ruling that required filtering, finding that the filtering provisions violated European Union e-commerce laws, and infringed on the rights of Scarlet and its customers.

The broad monitoring required to filter file-sharing would "infringe the fundamental rights of [Scarlet's] customers, namely their right to protection of their personal data and their right to receive or impart information, which are rights safeguarded by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU," the court panel wrote."

[disi]

I need it for makemkv and mplayer to rip/play BD...

[ebuild R ] media-libs/libbluray-0.2.1 USE="java xine xml -aacs -static-libs -utils" 0 kB

Works fine for months already.

[mudd1]

Requires an entire Java JRE. Doesn't actually play any Blu Ray discs.

AFAIK --enable-bdjava is not even the default for libbluray. Anyway, switch it off if you don't need it. As others have mentioned, libbluray needs libaacs and a KEYDB.cfg to be able to play encrypted BDs (virtually all of them). Newer ones might still not be supported. Also not supported are discs using BD+ which would need libbdplus. It's not publicly available and even the version you can't download doesn't really work. So no, Blurays still are not something you can just play with normal software. And yes, in the US you can go to jail for watching a movie you bought. Welcome to the Land of the Free.

[r1348]

When SOPA passes (and some form of it will), the United States will probably attack VLC through the ITA and do a wikileak's style defunding blockade by not allowing credit card, paypal, etc. donations to VLC. we'll see if this is an "American" problem then.

This has more to do with the US treating the whole world as their jurisdiction - thus ignoring every single legal principle since well, law exists - than VLC committing any felony.

[DaemonFC]

Please take look at http://www.videolan.org/legal.html. I'll spell out some of the important parts here:

"VideoLAN is an organization based in France." (their emphasis)
"Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable"
"VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US juridiction." (again, their emphasis)

Given this, do you have any basis for believing that they don't care about the law?

When SOPA passes (and some form of it will), the United States will probably attack VLC through the ITA and do a wikileak's style defunding blockade by not allowing credit card, paypal, etc. donations to VLC. we'll see if this is an "American" problem then.

[archibald]

I never recall stating that the VLC people care about the law. They don't. It's not only illegal (in the US anyway) to distribute it fully functional, but it violates literally dozens of US software patents.)

Please take look at http://www.videolan.org/legal.html. I'll spell out some of the important parts here:

"VideoLAN is an organization based in France." (their emphasis)
"Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable"
"VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US juridiction." (again, their emphasis)

Given this, do you have any basis for believing that they don't care about the law?

[DaemonFC]

I should also mention that libdvdcss might not be a DMCA violation since it is not cracking anything. DVD CSS was not meant as "content protection", it was intended to make sure that DVD players had to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum and therefore also support User Backstabbing Operations.

libdvdcss doesn't crack anything, it simply shotguns the weak 40 bit cipher with random possible keys until one works, then it saves the key that worked so subsequent loading of that title is faster next time. This way they don't have to pay the DVD Forum and they don't have to have mandatory User Backstabbing Operations. (I'm sorry Dave, you MUST watch all 10 minutes of advertising on that disc. I cannot allow you to fast forward! Hey! What are you doing! Stop that! We can talk about this! OWWW!!!!)