So I thought I answer a few of the questions that have popped up accross the web after the shop launch and yesterdays blog entry.

Yes, they are available under the terms link just before you finalize your order to go to the payment system. I realize a lot of people want to be able to read over the EULA before getting that far so I will put them up somewhere more easily reachable today.

Often the bundles will grow and people who bought the bundle as it is will be able to download the new bigger bundle for free. However there will also be new bundles made as things progress.

We will soon start to offer some encoders too. Our windows media audio encoder is already in the beta program and the windows media video encoder is in final stages of development before hitting the beta program. To begin with these will be just separate download or maybe part of an windows media encoding bundle. As more encoders gets created we probably will offer bigger encoding bundles to, similar to the playback ones.

This will not happen. We are still a small company and the cost of supporting even more frameworks in a good way is daunting.

Because we don’t have them ported yet. To be honest the popularity of the Windows media plugins on Linux PPC and Solaris will determine if we ever do port them in fact. Unless the plugin available for these platforms sell well enough to validate the cost of porting more codecs there will be no further codecs supported on these platforms. That said we are not going to pass judgement on either platform very quickly. For Linux PPC we will let PS3 be out on the market a while before start making assumptions about the viability of that market and for Solaris we will let Sun ship something else than just development versions of Solaris bundled with GStreamer 0.10.

The answer is Yes, to some degree, and maybe. We have a working Real Media decoder plugin, but we will not be able to release that before we have a full Real Media networking stack to use it with, but this is being worked on and shouldn’t be to far away. As for Quicktime we will be able to support AAC and H264 which seems to be the most used Quicktime codecs today and the Quicktime container format is just a tweaked version of the MPEG4 ISO format. So we will be able to offer something that plays most Quicktime trailers, but we might not be able to call it Quicktime support though due to trademark issues and of course not supporting Apple specific codecs such as Sorenson. As for Flash video or VP6 as its also called. Well we are trying to work something out there, but its still quite up in the air what will happen.

Ok, so as promised the shop.fluendo.com is now live with all our codecs!. You guys have no idea all the practical issues delaying this, the last that hit us today being the credit card system suddenly refusing payments in dollars so we had to switch the shop over to Euro.

Anyway the press release is out and hopefully we get some good coverage. This release should also be a response to Eric Raymonds request
for someone to save him from the lack of codecs.

As you will see if you go to the shop we support Windows Media codecs on Linux x86_32, Linux x86_64, Linux PPC, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC, just as we do with our MP3 plugin. Depending on interest other platforms could follow.

For Linux x86_32 and Linux x86_64 we also have MPEG2, AC3 and MPEG4 Part available. AAC is underway.

People will also notice that we rebate heavily if you buy the codecs in bundles, this is because we really prefer to stear people away from the single codecs purchases as they cost us as much as a bundle per transaction, which means more money to the bank and less to us :)

The codecs are distributed inside tarballs together with instructions. We realize this is not as painless an install as one could wish for. But doing packages for a million and one distro’s was not a plausible solution either. That said we are working on a codec installer/updater which will automatically download and install any codec bought in the shop. It will also upgrade those codecs as updates becomes available. The idea is that a purchase of the codecs gives you a year of updates, after which you can buy an discounted update to continue getting updated codecs and bundles.

So I hope people like the shop and also for anyone reading this wanting a site license, we do offer that, but that will be handled outside the shop. The shop is targeted at people looking for 20 or less licenses.

So for a *long* time we have promised to provide a wide set of plugins
for GStreamer through the Fluendo webshop. We have had a series of plugins in beta testing for a long time now while at the same time sorting out the final legal and other practical issues. Anyway things are now ready I have been working a lot on getting everything ready this week.

As a final grand test I have updated the mp3 plugin we have offered for free on the shop for a while now. Due to this I would like to ask that anyone reading this blog entry please try downloading the new mp3 plugin and testing it on their systems. Currently the shop contains an GStreamer MP3 plugin for X86_32, x86_64, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC. Also trying to get a Linux PPC version online today. People who have gotten our plugin earlier from the webshop should also get this new version as the code has many bugfixes and improvements over the first version we offered.

The new bug system should be available on Monday, so anyone downloading and having problems during the weekend with the plugins please just send me an email on christian at fluendo dot com.

So unless this final mini test should turn up something unexpected I will upload all the plugins on Monday and send out a press release.

Be aware that the webshop offers you two payment systems so be sure to choose the ‘Free of Charge’ one for the mp3 plugin as the credit card system do not handle charges of 0 very well :) We will be working on getting rid of the credit card option as an option when people just get our free stuff.