Restricted formats

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

This page describes third-party software that does not meet the OLPC standards for software freedom. The use of such software is unsupported; OLPC does not endorse or encourage its use.

In some jurisdictions, patents on algorithms apply and royalty payments may be required. Examples include MP3, and MPEG-4. This is a particular nuisance for media players, for which many of the common codecs algorithms are patented. In other jurisdictions, software patents do not apply and there are usually freely available implementations for these algorithms available.

Sometimes, as in Adobe Flash®, or the Real Helix® player there are free (as in beer) implementations available, where those corporations have paid these patent royalties and made usually (binary) versions of codecs available. This has direct consequences as OLPC does not want to burden all machines with payment of what may be unnecessary duplicate patent royalties: OLPC must therefore leave the customization of the distribution for these formats for "in country". For jurisdictions in which such patent laws apply, there are now solutions such as those sold by Fluendo to these issues.

The Flash format (whether Adobe's Flash 9 or Gnash) illustrates this problem well; even though we include Gnash, we distribute a build that does not have support for MP3 or MPEG-4; you may rebuild Gnash to include these codecs.

  For the general public

Instructions for installing software for dealing with web-based multimedia such as Flash and Java applets using proprietary players or codecs:

MP3

Fluendo has made available a free (as in beer) MP3 codec, with a free (as in speech) implementation, with a paid up license for the Gstreamer code framework. This requires execution of a license agreement for redistribution; unfortunately, the agreement does not permit sub-licensing, so while including it would be convenient and OLPC may choose to execute this agreement in the future, those redistributing our software would still have to execute this agreement to legally redistribute the codec.

In order to download the codec you have to "check out" the Fluendo mp3 decoder from their store for $0.00. You are then allowed to download the file fluendo-mp3-2.i386.tar.bz2

For more info, see the Fluendo mp3 decoder page.

Rebuilding Gnash for MP3 and MPEG-4 support

When configuring Gnash, use the following option:

configure --enable-media=ffmpeg

Adobe Flash

It has been noted that version 9.0.48 runs slower than 9.0.31, so you may want to try that version instead.

From the Terminal activity:

su
rpm -i http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-9.0.48.0-release.i386.rpm

More detailed instructions can be found here.

Proprietary code bundle for the Helix player

See the Helix media activity page for details.

Sun Java

Note that Sun is in the process of relicensing their Java implementation to free software, but it is not yet available in that form. Its size (the SDK "on disk" size is 75 megabytes and its memory consumption is large) makes it difficult to swallow. We are investigating other Java implementations as they mature, and the BTest-3 systems and after will have 1GB of flash.

1. Goto http://java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp
2. Download "Linux RPM (self-extracting file)";
3. Copy the file to an XO;
4. From the Terminal activity, type:

su
chmod a+x jre-1_5_0_11-linux-i586-rpm.bin
./jre-1_5_0_11-linux-i586-rpm.bin
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

(Take care to check that the filenames in the above commands match those that you download: copying these instructions in their entirety will not work since the filenames change as Sun issues new releases.)

You can check which browser plugins you have installed by visiting the page "about:plugins" in the Browse activity.