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Slightly related to the discussion here: yesterday I found out that the Rasberry Pi is about 10% cheaper because it doesn't include licences for proprietary cod
by dave1010uk 13y ago
Slightly related to the discussion here: yesterday I found out that the Rasberry Pi is about 10% cheaper because it doesn't include licences for proprietary codecs [1]. As consumer electronics are getting cheaper and open/free licenses are becoming more popular, hopefully we'll see more of this happening.
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/ http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoIt sucks though, because to watch H.264 on it you have to buy a license key for it to unlock the hardware on the device.
- Narishma 13y agoNo, you don't. H264 can be decoded on the hardware out of the box. The licenses are only for MPEG-2 and VC1.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoAh, my bad.
- Narishma 13y agoThe RPi does come with licenses for some proprietary codecs, namely MPEG-4 Part 10 (H264) and MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, Xvid and the like), mostly because they're cheap and their use widespread. The extra license you can buy are for codecs that are either too expensive (MPEG-2) or not used very much so their inclusion would increase the price of the RPi for everyone while only being useful for a few.