The licensing rights for the MPEG-2 standard are made up of a pool of patents contributed by their inventors. In particular, you need access to the following: Welcome to the wonderful world of software licensing, where today we get to see a real-world example of the differences between commercial software and free software published under an open source license.Īny commercial product-hardware or software-that plays back DVDs has to have a license to a handful of software components that are protected by patents. How come VLC can do it and Microsoft can't?" "But I can download the VLC player for Windows and get DVD playback for free. "Microsoft says the cost of DVD playback adds up to several dollars," the argument goes. I look at the big numbers and walk through the math in a follow-up post How much do DVD and digital media playback features really cost?īut I wanted to interrupt the discussion here to answer a question that several people have asked.
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