[XviD-devel] Possible GPL violation by Nvideo Technology

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

Hello, folks.

You probably haven't heard about NPlayer[1], supposedly Nvideo Tech's own
product.

They advertised it in June 2004 on doom9 forum[2], but vanished quickly
when someone uncovered it as a potential MPlayer ripoff.

It isn't so obvious now, probably because they obfuscated the strings in
the binaries more thoroughly (some kind of compression, I guess).

We (MPlayer team) never investigated it[3], but maybe it's time to change
that.

What does it have to do with XviD? Well, now they're selling NConvert[4],
which seems to contain at least XviD 0.9.1 copyright notice in one of the
files that get installed:

[~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/nvideo-tech/firmwire]$ md5sum enccore.firm
7ed2323299043249e02246c7001aea50  enccore.firm
[~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/nvideo-tech/firmwire]$ strings enccore.firm | egrep 'XviD|source code'
This software is derived from the GNU GPL XviD codec (0.9.1).
Your software distributor has to give access to its source code.

I thought you might be interested in investigating that.

Regards,
R.

[1] http://www.nvideo-tech.com/nplayer_detail.htm
[2] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=78043
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.mplayer.devel/18174
[4] http://www.nvideo-tech.com/nconvert_detail.htm

PS. While googling for the copyright notice, I came across this:
http://www.pdaphonehome.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25576&perpage=20&pagenumber=2
PS2. I guess nobody is buying "their" software or else we would've
     heard about it by now...

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://rpm.greysector.net/mplayer/
"I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey.
 We stand between the darkness ... and the light."
        -- Delenn in Grey Council in Babylon 5:"Babylon Squared"