Don’t misunderstand me, as I’m not preaching the value of proprietary codecs. Despite Theora's shortcomings with rendering speed and overall playback quality in comparison to proprietary alternatives, this does not mean that all open source codecs are loosing ground in the fight for your video viewing freedom.

The mobile version of Ubuntu appears to be passing money to Microsoft, which has an effect on redistribution rights as well

here are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision. And in a recent article, I took this whole idea to task and examine how it may not actually be illegal to use libdvdcss after all.

Historically, Linux was unable to play files intended to only be playable with the Windows Media Player. However, with the help of codecs, Linux can play both audio and video files that were previously incompatible. Jack Wallen introduces the major players in the Linux multimedia party.

I think anyone interested in Linux saw this NY Times article today. I agreed with the article for the mostpart except for the end where the author stated that “one challenge for Linux users is finding media players that work with encrypted music and DVDs. Ubuntu comes with a movie player, but it is not automatically configured to play copy-protected commercial DVDs.

There’s one aspect of Ubuntu, and Linux in general for that matter, that’s putting me off. This is the fact that to play a DVD or use WMA/WMV files I have to install codecs that are technically illegal to use.