this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
1073 points (97.7% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
2809 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1073
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a "Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement." This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, "Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least)." Unity is swiftly coming to it's demise.

Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 224 points 11 months ago (2 children)

For anyone wondering:

  1. There was a plugin on Unity Store that acted a bridge between Unity and libVLC, which allowed developers to make video players inside the game engine. As the post says, it got removed.
  2. This plugin isn't made by VideoLAN, it's made by a company named Videolabs that includes several people who supposedly have contributed a lot on VLC and FFMPEG.
  3. The Videolan team made a blog post about this, if you want to know more: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
[–] [email protected] 92 points 11 months ago

VideoLabs is made up of many of the same contributors of VideoLAN, including Jean-Baptiste Kempf themself. It is arguable that this is in fact Unity banning VideoLAN's VLC bridges for media playback in Unity.