"Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net> writes:

> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Greg Troxel wrote:
>
>> Index: mplayer/DESCR
>> ===================================================================
>> RCS file: /cvsroot/pkgsrc/multimedia/mplayer/DESCR,v
>> retrieving revision 1.1.1.1
>> diff -u -p -r1.1.1.1 DESCR
>> --- mplayer/DESCR	26 Jan 2004 12:08:12 -0000	1.1.1.1
>> +++ mplayer/DESCR	22 Mar 2007 13:56:43 -0000
>> @@ -12,3 +12,6 @@ enjoy movies in fullscreen. It also spor
>>  shaded subtitles (10 supported types) with european/ISO 8859-1,
>>  2 (hungarian, english, czech, etc), cyrillic, korean fonts, and
>>  OSD.
>> +
>> +The default build omits many codecs for licensing reasons; examine the
>> +options.
>
> This is a little unclear -- above that it mentions some of the codecs that 
> may not be enabled. Maybe the first paragraph should be cleaned up. And 
> then add a paragraph about what needs to be done for enabling the above 
> disabled codecs.

Perhaps just "(including some listed above)".  In general DESCR is
just the blurb from the upstream web site.  As for hints about
options, we generally don't put that in DESCR.

> Would the user have to rebuild/reinstall mplayer? For example, if they 
> want Real Media, can they somehow just install realplayer-codecs package 
> and some mplayer plugin package?

Yes, they'd have to rebuild.  But keep in mind that someone now has to
build/install from source since the binaries aren't distributed.

I think the root of the difficulty is the intersection of patent
issues and that mplayer doesn't use a plug-in architecture.   So for a
package we have to ask if it's better to

  strip down all the offending features and have binary pkgs, so that
  some who have licenses or are in compatible jurisdictions will want
  to rebuild

or

  just let the whole package will be omitted, so that that those above
  will just build it.


Perhaps we need a mechanism PKG_SUGGESTED_RESTRICTED_OPTIONS that will
default to off for bulk builds, or can be turned off with one
variable, and will default to aborting and asking the user to declare
whether they want those options merged into PKG_SUGGESTED_OPTIONS or not.
  

For the DMCA claim about mplayer, the only thing I'm aware of would be
using libdvdcss.  But libdvdread defaults to not using that, and
playing a non-CSS DVD is not as far as I know a DMCA issue, and
certainly isn't if one is the copyright holder, e.g. playing home
movies, or if I play one of my company's own non-CSS promotional DVDs.
But IANAL.