[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

Wed Sep 21 10:59:07 CEST 2011

Am 21.09.2011 10:52, schrieb Oliver Burger:
+> 2011/9/21 Florian Hubold<doktor5000 at arcor.de>:
+>> Am 21.09.2011 02:14, schrieb Philippe DIDIER:
+>>> Anssi Hannula wrote /Tue Sep 20 17:29:44/ :
+>>>> Including faac itself is no less safe than other patent-encumbered
+>>>> codecs, since the non-free parts do not forbid redistribution.
+>>> The only non-free and non GPL part of FAAC is the ISO MPEG reference code
+>>> which
+>>> it is based on... to comply with this international standard (nothing
+>>> strange in that)
+>>> everything else is LGPL .
+>>> An international standard may not be modified,  for sure, and is surely
+>>> not GPL !
+>>> And for this reason we may consider FAAC as non-free...
+>>>
+>>> Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a
+>>> proprietary encoder
+>>> (like NERO aac encoder that can't be distribuable... and is surely not GPL
+>>> !)
+>> This is simply not true, there is vo-aacenc and there is also ffaac, both
+>> from ffmpeg.
+> If there are alternatives to faac I strongly suggest, not adding faac
+> to any of our repos, after all, we are using and providing
+> OpenSource-Software and should follow its philosophy.
+> If others don't care about it, we still should.
+>
+> Oliver
+>
+AFAIK, the output quality of ffaac is not quite good and it's in experimental 
+state.
+For vo-aacenc, it's a different problem, for now it doesn't even support
+direct encoding of 5.1/7.1 audio it only does downmix it to 2.0 stereo.
+
+We would have replaced bundled faac in handbrake, if there wouldn't have
+been those restrictions, and also as faac is default encoder and
+fallback alternative in many scenarios, so there may be bugs due to that.
+
+For other packages this may still be an option if it's only about encoding
+music tracks or something the like.
+