phyxeld's Journal: Microsoft WMA support officially coming to Linux

According to an article at Wininformant.com, Microsoft has asked a company called InterVideo to port WMA support to Linux. "We believe most of the major consumer electronics companies are looking at the Linux platform as a stable, low-cost solution for multimedia functionality," said Steve Ro, InterVideo's CEO. They aren't porting Windows Media Player, however, just bringing support for the format to embedded linux customers (read: PVR makers), "at low licensing costs". (So buckle your seatbelts, kids, cause linux warez are just around the corner :) It's nice to see MS finally acknowledging that GNU/Linux isn't going away anytime soon, and that a consumer-targeted media format really does need to be playable on it.

Update: jeffy124 pointed out that my submission wasn't accepted because it was already posted. I guess I missed some slashdot that day. But, really, when did /. start rejecting submissions just for being dupes? Shouldn't that have made it more likely to get posted?

methinks....

[jeffy124]

you are a few days late: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/225206 [slashdot.org]

Re:methinks....

[phyxeld]

ah, so I am :)
oops.

This is just for embedded, right?

[jcast]

So I don't think MS will let it be useful as a starting point for desktop-based warez.

Re:This is just for embedded, right?

[phyxeld]

I think you're right, that that is what they intend to do. But when storebought TiVo's are shipping with GNU+Linux+Proprietary_WMA_Codecs installed, how long do you think it will take people to figure out a way to get the WMA parts working on their desktop systems? (I'm assuming the InterVideo stuff will work better than the reverse-engineered hacks that people are using to play WMA today). The only way they could pull it off would be to do the WMA stuff in hardware, which is probably what they'll end up do

Re:This is just for embedded, right?

[jcast]

That may be. I was wondering about hardware compatibility, though---do TiVos ship with Intel-compatible CPUs? If not (or if MS can change the CPU to a non-Intel processor), that would make pirating the stuff an order of magnitude harder. That's what I'd expect them to do, really.

Re:This is just for embedded, right?

[Com2Kid]

• TiVos ship with Intel-compatible CPUs?

No, PowerPC chips.

Which is quite irrelevant. WMP runs on MacOS7.1 through OSX, so it can be run on the PowerPC platform.

Heck, the darned thing runs on Solaris, so it IS portable, when MS wants to port it that is.