[Haifux] Student complaints.

[Oron Peled]

On Tuesday, 3 בFebruary 2009, Amichai Rotman wrote:
> I had the same problem when I tried to play content broadcasted by CastUP (a
> popular streaming provider).

I encountered two unrelated problems with video streamed from web-sites:

1. Codecs. Easily solved by VLC. I've yet to see a codec
   unsupported by it.
   Note that some distros (e.g: Fedora) do not distribute these by
   default due to specific legal problems (US patents on algorithms).
   In less bizarre countries this is easily solvable by installing
   the missing pieces from non-US repositories (e.g: rpmfusion.org
   for Fedora).
   Me (non-lawyer) thinks that Israel has no software patents yet
   so this should be safe (Naive? Don't know).

2. Web sites trying to obfuscate the links from their page to the
   video stream so people would have to see it interactively instead
   of (e.g) reaping it to their computer/mp4-player/other-device for
   off-line viewing at their own leisure.

   This can usually worked around using "Mazrim" by Ilan Shavit:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/mazrim/

Cheers,

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
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