To provide a non-US Ubuntu?

[Corey Burger]

On 8/3/06, Darryl Moore <darryl at moores.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 10:20 +0300, Rob Bowers wrote:
> > Re: recent discussion on providing a non-US Ubuntu, not fettered by US
> > patent restrictions
> >
> > Lets do it, for political reasons if not for practical.
> >
> > We can speculate about what will happen to patent policies. Either it
> > will work fine, and going by Canada's laws will be seen to be an easy
> > way to work around US policies. (Someone tell me why the world should
> > heed their anachronistic, conservative policies at all).
> >
> > Or something will react. Maybe Canada's patent policies will be made
> > less ambiguous. The world would take note. In this case, it will have
> > been a successful protest.
> >
> > Your thoughts?
>
> So we should at least be able to add DeCSS and MP3 as part of the normal
> install. NOT w32codecs. However a desktop link to the PLF and .DEB's
> might be good? Anything else?
>
> I do not know about DivX, quicktime or some others. Are they distributed
> with Ubuntu at the moment? Is there a list of what codecs are or not
> currently included?
>
> What else could we add that could reasonably be considered legal by
> Canadian law?

The second question (legality under Canadian law) I cannot answer, but
the former (codecs supported), I can. Ubuntu, in multiverse, currently
ships decoders for all major codecs except VC-1/WMV9, although this is
being added to ffmpeg as we speak. Thus with edgy and all the various
gstreamer plugins installed, the only thing people are going to need
is livdvdcss2, which can be installed via a script in libdvdread. Thus
there is no need for plf.

Corey