[COLUG] [No] MPEG video in RHEL5: Patents

[Scott Merrill]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:54 PM, jep200404 <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> "Scott Merrill" wrote:
>
>> I'm a bit surprised to find that MPEG video support appears to be
>> completely absent from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 [RHEL5] Desktop.
>
> Not only am I not surprised to find that RHEL5 does not have MPEG
> support, I expect RHEL5 to not have MPEG support, since Red Hat
> tries to be the pure open source play, and since MPEG is
> encumbered with patents, MPEG can not be open source
> (or at least not GPL).
>
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2#Patent_holders
>
> I don't know which version of MPEG you're looking for support for,
> but I think you'll find patents for at least the versions of MPEG
> that you want support for.

Debian, one of the most zealously Free Software distributions around,
makes available an MPEG codec in their main distribution tree:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=mpeg&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=main

Only 100% Free Software (as defined by the FSF) is supposed to go into
the Main repository.

libmpeg2-4
http://packages.debian.org/etch/libmpeg2-4
which is based on this GPL licensed upstream code:
http://libmpeg2.sourceforge.net/

So, short of compiling libmpeg2-4 myself (and potentially rolling it
out to any academic lab computer that uses RHEL5), what is the
RHEL-blessed mechanism for obtaining and installing video codecs?

Cheers,
Scott