Despite all its advances, GNU/Linux remains weak in its support for proprietary audio and video codecs. Because these codecs are often encumbered by patents, distributions must choose either to include support of questionable legality or else exclude it altogether.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20080720 with the following changes. * ogg filters/codecs: flac, theora, speex, vorbis, schroedinger * divx codec update * fix made to winetrickstmp * ffdshow updated to beta 5 *
fix made to firefox3... If you use the codecs that winetricks supports this is a important update as there has been many useful fixes and updates to this area.

After a one year beta phase, the Xiph Foundation's free Ogg Theora video codec has been released in its final, "mainline", version 1.0.

For the first time we are making codecs for media playback and a DVD player, from our partners at Fluendo and Cyberlink, available through the Ubuntu store. We have had relationships with these companies for a while and to date we have offered their products to our hardware partners as pre-install options.

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,