She stressed that providing a blanket licence would have cost too much. The UK-based foundation spent "some months" on the process of sorting out "an individual licence for an individual user to download and use with an individual machine", which in the case of MPEG-2 meant working with MPEG-LA, Upton said.
#Mpeg 2 and vc1 codec license keys serial
's 16-digit serial number, and buyers should receive a licence key within three days of ordering. At the same time, fans can now also buy a licence for VC-1, Microsoft's WMV video codec, for £1.20.Įach licence is tied to the Linux computer The licence for MPEG-2 - a longstanding and popular format used by many to encode ripped DVDs, Blu-ray titles and TV shows - costs £2.40 on the Raspberry Pi store. This will allow you to play MPEG-2 material from XBMC and omxplayer, which hasn't been an available feature before now," foundation spokeswoman Liz Upton wrote in a blog post. It is widely characterized as an alternative to the latest ITU-T and MPEG video codec standard known as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Hardware en/decoders are much faster and do not rely on the core CPU to process these files rather the GPU is used to process the files. It is an evolution of the conventional DCT-based video codec design also found in H.261, H.263, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. For an extra £2.40 you can watch MPEG2 video, ie DVDs are encoded in MPEG2 For an extra £1.20 you can decode VC-1 video, ie Microsofts Silverlight Video. "From today, you'll be able to purchase an MPEG-2 decode licence which will be tied to your Raspberry Pi's unique serial number. Its most popular implementation is Windows Media Video 9.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation answered those pleas on Friday, revealing that it has struck deals that allow individuals to buy the licences if they want to add them to the H.264 support baked into the Raspberry Pi's hardware.
#Mpeg 2 and vc1 codec license keys full
However, this left many with media libraries full of MPEG-2 videos unable to play them, unless they transcoded gigabytes of data - something they were vociferously unhappy about. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has started selling licences for MPEG-2 and VC-1 video codecs, after complaints from users who turned the cheap Linux computer into a media centre.īecause the £25 Linux computer was developed as an aid for teaching kids to program, the Raspberry Pi's designers decided not to include an MPEG-2 support on the grounds of cost.