With today’s GStreamer update, you are able to watch WebM videos. That means you can enjoy Youtube with a stock Fedora 13. You need the following ingredients:
- The updates-testing repository enabled until
- A browser that uses GStreamer, such as Epiphany or Midori.
- Opting in to the Youtube HTML5 beta.
- A Youtube video that is already provided in WebM, such as this one.
This update will also arrive in Fedora 12.
And because quite a few people have asked about this in bug reports or email, I will note that this will be the last feature update I intend to do for GStreamer packages on Fedora 12. As GStreamer updates are quite intrusive and can have unexpected consequences, I don’t like to push new packages into releases unless I run them myself and can easily debug them. So if you want up-to-date GStreamer packages, you will always have to run the latest Fedora release – or of course any non-released alpha, beta or rawhide.
18 comments ↓
Do you mind providing the appropriate yum update command?
Cheers.
But GStreamer is LGPL and libvpx is not LGPL compatible… how are you getting around this licensing snafu?
And you don’t mind violating Free licenses?
Is it license incompatible?
So far I haven’t seen any lawyer or person involved with the two projects claim that it is. And random people on the internet don’t count.
The FFmpeg project says it is, and I think they’re right when it comes to the GPL: the problem is that the patent reciprocation clause also extends to the copyright license, not just to the patent grant. See the FFmpeg mailing list for the discussions. The LGPL, on the other hand, allows linking to almost everything, so I don’t see how this license would be incompatible with the LGPL. But using this GStreamer plugin with Epiphany or Midori might be a violation of those browsers’ GPL licenses (depending on those projects’ stance on plugins).
wow this is great news. I was wondering when F13 will get webm, since rawhide was already working.
Also have an idea how do i encode to webm using this (not installing out of repo packages)
“But using this GStreamer plugin with Epiphany or Midori might be a violation of those browsers’ GPL licenses”
Yes, probably. Using the Adobe Flash plugin, the non-free Sun Java plugin, the non-free Fluendo GStreamer plugins, etc. violates Epiphany’s/Midori’s licenses too though. What both browsers need is a exception clause in the license for plugins, like totem has. Or they should use the LGPL. See the last section of this here for more information: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/licensing.html
I don’t think the license is incompatible with the LGPL or version 3 of the GPL but it’s likely that it’s incompatible with version 2 of the GPL because it’s very similar to the Apache license in the problematic paragraph and this incompatibility is a known fact. But then, I’m just another random person on the internet and no lawyer ;)
Note that epiphany is GPLv2 or any later version so it might be fine in the libvpx case if the libvpx license is really compatible with the GPLv3
I tried the latest packages from koji, they work fine with Epiphany and Transmageddon seems to be able to encode to WebM now. However, Totem is unable to play WebM files… does it need to be updated, too?
Update to my last comment: I was wrong, Totem actually plays WebM files correctly now. Only the mime/default app association is missing. Maybe that should be updated as well?
The GPL imposes no restrictions on use, it is completely OK to combine GPL’ed works with GPL-incompatible works as long as they are not distributed.
Since browser modules are only loaded at runtime and do not link against the browsers, there is no GPL violation.
But distributing a core dump of a browser crash could be considered a combined work of browser (GPL-licensed) and module (GPL-incompatible) and thus not distributable.
I’d like to point out that this update is not yet (2010-06-01 17:30 UTC+2) in updates-testing.
Check the status here (“pending” means it’s not yet installable with the usual yum commands):
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.23-1.fc13,gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-0.10.19-1.fc13
When this update hits the repos, try this:
sudo yum update –enablerepo=updates-testing ‘gstreamer*’
until them you can download the rpms manually (click on ‘builds’ on the referenced fedora page).
PAckages are now in the F12 updates-testing repo. Sadly, I can’t see any video in epiphany, despite everything else works correctly.
That likely means that the F12 webkit-gtk version is too old to handle this properly. :(
I guess you’ll have to update to F13 to enjoy Youtube then. People have been giving that update incredible amounts of Karma, so it’ll be autopushed to F13-stable with the next update tonight.
Ok. I’m trying to rebuild locally the F13 webkit rpm to see if it’s possible to have a working setup.
Thanks a lot for the info (and for your work on this!)
And it works! webkitgtk 1.2 from F13 “only” takes 68 minutes to build in mock, apart from that I can now see HTML5/WebM videos.
Do you know if 1.2 API is backward compatible? If so I could open a ticket for the update
Webkit should be API compatible, yes. But even if not, the newest 1.1 release will most likely work, too.
Just FYI for Fedora users following along. If you are using Fedora 12, you also need
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/webkitgtk-1.2.0-1.fc12
Once you installed the Gstreamer and this update, WebM files play just fine in browsers like Epiphany and Midori which use Gstreamer. Firefox won’t because it doesn’t use Gstreamer.
http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-webm-open-source-license.html
Should end the license discussion.