* Christian Marillat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [20011019 15:50]: > >> "DIL" == David I Lehn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I packaged liba52 and libmpeg2 a while ago. They've been sitting at > > http://gstreamer.net/releases/debian/ (along with gstreamer debs too). > > I'm still in limbo in the new maintainer queue and figure I should ITP > > this stuff, update it, and get it in the archives. > > liba52 is an ac3 encoder ? > > If yes, can you read: > > http://www.netbsd.org/Letters/20010803-dolby.html >
Yeah, seen it. Aaron and walken, the original authors of ac3dec, have never been contacted about this. I beleive Aaron had initally informed Dolby of his intention to write ac3dec and never received a reply. Maybe this all doesn't matter legally, IANAL etc. The project now uses the term "a52" or A/52 because it implements the ATSC A/52 standard and Dolby's errata to that document. Perhaps it was also renamed to avoid some trademark issues but I'm not sure. So does this mean the library is not suitable for Debian? Other projects use liba52 code, libac3 code (old version), or other implementations of the specs: xine, mplayer, xmps, videolan, avifile, and probably many more. Many of these are already in Debian archives. I haven't checked but I assume they are complete upstream code bases, ac3 decoding source and all. So do I need to talk to -legal? Or has this issue already been resolved with these other packages? The standards doc and errata used for implementation are available at: http://www.atsc.org/standards/a_52.pdf http://www.dolby.com/tech/ATSC_err.pdf -dave -- David I. Lehn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://www.lehn.org/~dlehn/ Computer Engineering Graduate @ Virginia Tech in sunny Blacksburg, VA
