Re: [Gnash] MP3 support

[Daniel James]

Hi Rob,

At 64 Studio, we're building a native x86_64 Linux distribution designed
specifically for content creation, including Flash and other vector
animation, and MP3 support within Flash is one of the problems we've
been struggling with. We want at least the core distribution to be free
software, and in addition since there is no native x86_64 Flash player
from Adobe yet, we don't currently have any Flash player within the
distribution at all.

In a nutshell, our problem is: if a GPL Flash player has a dependency on
a GPL MP3 playback library then it cannot satisfy the GPL and the MP3
patent licence at the same time. If we don't take out the patent licence
we risk being sued for past damages at some point in the future -
multiplied by the number of copies of our distribution downloaded.

The situation with the MP3 decoder patents seems to be that they are
currently not enforced against free software projects, while the encoder
patents are. This would make sense from the patent holder's point of
view, since they naturally want as many players as possible to support
their format, while encoders are less common and can be tapped as an
income stream (at a higher patent licence rate). So Red Hat and Ubuntu
do not ship an MP3 decoder in their distribution; Debian takes a 
reactive approach and will remove the decoder if/when threatened with 
legal action. This means that most distributions - not just 64 Studio - 
won't be able to legally ship a fully working Gnash unless they can 
solve the MP3 patent problem.

The best work-around we've figured out so far is to use the LGPL
Gstreamer framework and a legal, patent-licensed MP3 plugin (proprietary
of course) from Fluendo. The trick then is to create a free software
Flash player that can pipe audio through Gstreamer to make use of the
legal decoder plugin.  Now in theory this could be made to work with
libswfdec, but it looks like Gnash could be a more up-to-date player. Do
you think Gnash could be made to work with Gstreamer, and if so, could
this cause a GPL problem piping through audio to a proprietary decoder?

I see the long term solution as adding Ogg Vorbis support to the Flash
specification. It sounds better than MP3 at low bitrates, and it's
royalty-free - which is good news for Adobe since they don't own the
main MP3 patents. Perhaps Gnash could lead the way by offering Vorbis
support one day - then we'd have the chance of both creation and 
playback tools which were both 100% free software and legally 
redistributable.

Cheers!

Daniel James