Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 17:11:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Litzinger <brian@MediaCity.com> To: hasty@rah.star-gate.com (Amancio Hasty) Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cdrom ... Message-ID: <199608080011.RAA08564@MediaCity.com> In-Reply-To: <199608072113.OAA05655@rah.star-gate.com> from Amancio Hasty at "Aug 7, 96 02:13:00 pm"
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Amancio Hasty wrote: > Anyone care to lend a hand to J"org with respect to handle cdroms for > audio/cdi/videocd, etc... > > I am not sure that we can do much on way of CDI or VideoCD except > for the ability of the driver to be able to read 2352 byte long > blocks and then have all the smarts on the program. If I am > not mistaken Philips may go after the author or FreeBSD if the > programming info is release to the general public. Usually, > what Philips has done is to ask that the programming info > to be undisclosed and may possibly ask for a fee for their > license which is less than $500 or so. Not sure how much > the license is however Brian will be able to tell us. I joined some consortium some time ago for $350. In exchange for which I got a 4 inch (10 cm) thick green book (not 'the Green book') with the CDI specification in it. VideoCD is covered in 'the White book' which I had access to via a previous employer. After producing with Amancio the code that reads VideoCD/CDI disks and plays them via Talisman MPEG I Decoder cards, I met with representatives of the Philips/Sony consortium with regards to what I had and what I wanted to do with it. It came down to You can't publish anything which might give away information contained in the specification. You can give away object, executables, and lkms. If you plan to make any money via the software you have developed give us a call and will arrange an appropriate royalty for ourselves. A very fine point was defined during the meeting which was we were going to give away the CDI/VideoCD "viewer" along with our product (MPEG I decoder) so our customers could view CDI and VideoCD diskettes. I felt during the negotiations that Philips wanted some percentage of the product sales (MPEG I decoder) but we basically said that it was just an addon and if it cost us money we would leave it off, thus our customers wouldn't be buying VideoCD or CDI media. The word 'view' was much better than than word 'play' during the discussions because the word play was too close to the word player. Philips/Sony get royalties from player manufacters like JVC. They also get royalties from content providers and media manufacturers. The Philips representatives pretty much agreed with our position, or more likely didn't smell much money, and went on to greener pastures. IMHO, putting the decoding of the CDI or VideoCD directory structures into the device layer is not the way to go. Or at least I don't see how it is useful. On the other hand, being able to read mode 2 form 2 sectors seems clearly to belong in the device layer. Applications such as CCD which plays tracks, or tmplay which can actually read and report the CDI directory info seem appropriate to me. -- Brian Litzinger brian@mediacity.com
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