legal questions about Xvid

[jkwarras]

Hi,

I was looking the audio encoding section when i've read a post about the legal aspect of ac3enc.dll, and "doom9" post that open source projects as ac3enc or Xvid can be used for free as long as it's for educational purposes.

I'm an independent filmmaker and i'm planning to shoot a digital film with another two independent filmamkers. It's obviously a small project, independent and self-produced work. We are discussing the right way to promote our future film and i've suggest to use Xvid instead of DivX because of the quality that the first brings, to make promotional trailers and scenes footage available on our project page. If we don't find a "normal" way to distribute the final film, we may start thinking in make it completely free available to download, in a Xvid/MP3(maybe Ogg vorbis) format.

All of this is of course a project but reading that post I start doubting if we can use Xvid (or another audio/video codec opensource) to promote or make available our film without having to pay licences fees (that we can't anyway).

[Sirber]

If you want to go legal, I'd go for RV9, WMV9 or DivX 5.1.

[cypher_soundz]

divx 5.1? can you use this for distribution? do you not have to pay per download/distribution?

Regards
Cyph

[jkwarras]

Siber, are you serious? RV9, WM9 and DivX 5.x are copyrighted and commercial codecs even if we can use it for free for personal usage but i thought that these wasn't at all free for promotional/distribution/download pourposes. I've read sometime ago that DivX 5.x can be used for non-commercial distribution of independents works but you have to stick to a "label", i'm not sure if it's always valid.

[bond]

to my knowledge there is no codec where you dont have to pay anything, when you want to stay on the legal side, except vorbis

[Sirber]

IIRC, you can use RV9 for free unless you want to stream.

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by Sirber
IIRC, you can use RV9 for free unless you want to stream.

Cool, i didn't know that, even in my case? :)

Does someone know about XviD?

I want to stay legal because we want a serious project, that's why i asking all this questions :)

[d'Oursse]

read this (for mpeg4 in general):

http://www.mpegla.com/mpeg4s/m4s_qa.html

(4th question-answer, i think)

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by d'Oursse
read this (for mpeg4 in general):

http://www.mpegla.com/mpeg4s/m4s_qa.html

(4th question-answer, i think)

Thanks for the link i will look at it, but i must admit i don't understand a sh*** of what they're talking about (all this legal language is too hard for me) :(