Sun Microsystems is setting out to create an open source, royalty-free video codec. Given the considerable head start of well-known, royalty-free video codecs like Dirac and Theora, you might ask why the world needs another. The answer, according to Sun, is the process the company will use to develop it -- starting with a full-on, careful examination of the patent situation.

Fedora 8's solution is to include Codec Buddy, and point it toward's Fluendo's legal but non-free codecs. At the same time, Codec Buddy opens with a message that "Fedora does not condone the use of audio and video codec that require patent licenses to be written and/or distributed. Due to the existence of such patents,

Six years after the project was launched, developers at the Xiph.Org Foundation have released a beta version of the free video codec called Ogg Theora. The source code of the libtheora 1.0 Beta 1 codec library can be downloaded from the developer website.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

"...As some of you Neuros old timers may recall, we were the first to port the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to a portable HDD audio player. Now it's time, hopefully, to do the same with the Ogg Theora video codec..."

Fedora 8 will ship with Codec Buddy by default, providing users with a simple click-through GUI for enabling playback of various kinds of media.

"After several years of development, the first beta release for Ogg Theora 1.0 - a free video codec - is now available. Now all we have to do is to get some content in the Theora format."

FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

EmbWise has ported its Linux SDIO stack to a video-oriented Texas Instruments (TI) system-on-chip (SoC) processor. SDIOWorx is now available on royalty-free terms for TI's daVinci DM6446 processor, which targets portable media players, video surveillance cameras, and digital photo frames, according to EmbWise.