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
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Found the article where the screenshot came from, and wow it’s even more infuriating! The VideoLAN folks tried to work with them for months, and Unity seems to have cranial rectal inversion.
Unity is probably developing their own video player and they wants devs to pay them for it, not use VLC for free.
This is almost certainly the case
Spot-on, this would be my bet too.
Capitalist making decisions based only on increased ROI?
Say it isn’t so.
Fuck I hate this “single goal” system.
So fucking short sighted.
😑↔️🍑
For anyone wondering:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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.
I also thought VLC was a bit shaky on their legality as well, but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc) with more lax copyright laws, they got away with it.
So I wouldn’t blame an app store for not wanting to take on legal gray area risk.
VLC is just a media player. It isn’t on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn’t on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren’t the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
But I shouldn’t be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the “legal gray area risk” that you mean here?
For context.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-vlc-can-ship-a-free-dvd-player-why-cant-microsoft/
Under French law DVD and Blu-ray codecs aren’t patentable and VLC is based in France. The organisation isn’t breaking any laws.
Whether using VLC in the US is the legal grey area.
So it’s not VideoLAN who might be breaking a law, it’s you by circumventing the anti piracy keys in DVDs and Blurays. Millennium copyright act and anywhere that signs up to a treaty containing reciprocal copyright law might have an issue.
Patent infringements might also be possible in the US if you edited that open source code in that country, but US to EU patent treaties don’t cover software France deems unpatentable so distributing the codec is probably fine as long as it’s of French origin (and non-commercial use as per the GPL licence)
In the UK, the codec might be patentable now after Brexit interestingly but we haven’t yet diverged on patent treaties with the EU yet as far as I know and we’re part of the US patent treaty still.
Similar things happened with MP3 codecs in Linux before it was also made free. You’d either be prompted to make the choice to install yourself during or after the install. Or perhaps 2 downloads offered, one with and one without.
All to show you as an individual made the choice to use those codecs. If there were any possible damages from an individual download is would be less than $40 in licencing. So a lawyer would have to submit a case for each individual for that as a possible settlement, not even guaranteed.
As long as a large organisation isn’t liable for the codec install, it falls into “de minimis” legal territory.
I remember a Live CD install of Ubuntu required some hoops to get codecs at one point in the distant past. I looked it up then out of curiosity.
The “legal grey area” is about codec patents and dvd playback.
There’s no software patents in the EU, when it comes to codecs the only thing patentable would be hardware implementations and if you have one of those whoever produces your CPU/GPU already paid for a license. DVD region-locking is at least sus to the commission but they never went ahead with antitrust etc. stuff probably because the market became irrelevant, also, the industry was smart enough to make the whole of the EU a single region. DeCSS is more of a grey area and currently unsettled but a Finnish court judged it legal because the mechanism circumvented is not effective. That’s a legal, not technical, thing, they’re basically saying that it’s closer to “circumventing” a copy blocker by disabling autostart when inserting a CD into your computer than it is to circumventing by actual decryption, which makes sense as the scheme is weak AF. That said if the industry were to upgrade the scheme they nowadays might run into a different set of anti-trust issues. Generally speaking nobody, not even the industry, really seems to care as physical media is pretty much dead.
Exactly.
Also, I think there was some question about whether it was legal to use ffmpeg under the hood depending on the use case (commercial). I imagine a plugin used inside commercial games would certainly violate licenses based on non-commercial use.
But seeing how my original comment was received, I doubt many here are actually interested in why it may be necessary. Let the anti Unity circle jerk continue.
If you’re using it commercially you should be building it such that it only supports what you need, and what you need should be something not patent encumbered. Because why would you shell out money for an inferior codec when you can choose freely what to encode your stuff with.
“Should” and what’s actual reality in multi national copywrite / license / patent law are rarely the same. Especially in this case where you have to include other people’s work (codecs and media players) just by the nature of the problem.
I only told you what you should do if you don’t want to get into legal trouble, that it’s simple, easy, and a good idea even if it wasn’t for US-specific bullshit. If people don’t to act sensibly, well that’s on them.
I think the discussion below your comment is good, but your comment, and the community response (in the form of comment votes), illustrates a problem I have with the lemmy community.
Counter arguments are important.
It seems Lemmy has an even bigger problem than Reddit did with circle jerks. Any counter argument that goes against the grain is immediately pounced on here. Especially if you don’t write a page long disclaimer that you don’t necessarily agree with the decision, I’m one of you, etc.
I simply pointed out that <hated company> may have had a good reason to consider <3rd party plugin> a big enough legal liability to triage out of their store for the time being, based on some half remembered related knowledge of murky legal details of the past.
You immediately implied that I’m some sort of corporate shill, even if it was politely worded. And the community piled on in response.
It would be nice if there was at least an attempt to understand both sides of an argument here.
Are,…we,…the baddies?
But what about all those highly voted articles about how OTHER social media sites are dangerous echo chambers!
Very fair!
Ha. The downvotes - to what seems like a reasonable reply (even if people disagree) - seem like they’re proving you right :)
If Unity had a problem with VLC playing copyrighted content they should have said so, not issued a takedown on LGPL grounds. Regardless of whether they’re right or not from a lawyer perspective, it’s a bad look for Unity to show the double standard here.
but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc)
It’s French. And there’s nothing shaky about it. It’s even fully endorsed by the EU.
Most of the people downvoting you dont seem to understand why VLC is only quasi legal in the US.
Because it can read DVDs. Which is evil (because they ought to pay a license). That’s all there is to it.
They’re stealing money from the mom and pop DVD technology license holders!!! 😡😡😡
Front VLC blog, link in post above
"After months of slow back-and-forth over email trying to find a compromise, including offering to exclude LGPL code from the assets, Unity basically told us we were not welcome back to their Store, ever. Even if we were to remove all LGPL code from the Unity package.
Where it gets fun is that there are currently hundreds if not thousands of Unity assets that include LGPL dependencies (such as FFmpeg) in the Store right now. Enforcement is seemingly totally random, unless you get reported by someone, apparently."
Imagine not using FFmpeg or anything that uses FFmpeg 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I suppose there are a lot of companies who would be glad to make you pay for their proprietary video standard, we would just pay for something formerly free 😟
Any reason not to expect all the others to get reported now? If Unity wants to tear themselves down, might as well speed it up.
According to the article, unity is literally built on software that uses this licensing, so it’s weird that they’d start going against it now. Their runtime literally includes it
Time to report Unity to itself so it can ban itself from its store.
Is there legal grounds for selective enforcement of policies like that?
Depends on the reason they chose to have selective enforcement.
A good analogy is kicking someone out of a bar. If you do it because they’re a dickhead… perfectly fine. But if it’s because they’re black… not OK.
… so what you do is set up a rule that everybody will break - “no drinking with shoes on” - and only enforce it against people you want to kick out 👍
Hey that sounds familiar!
What pisses me off about the whole Unity thing is that if Unity makes itself eat shit then it just further consolidates engines into fewer hands. Godot is great and all but it doesn’t have everything Unreal has (I’m not throwing shade it’ll get there dw) and I really really don’t want Epic to have a bigger stranglehold on the games industry than it already does.
Unity had its niche and if the executives could stop fucking around it would be lovely to have as a competitor in the landscape.
Also to everyone saying “just don’t use Unity”: there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow. You also have to consider how impractical it is to switch engines mid-development. There’s a reason why Unreal 5 has been out for multiple years and we’re only just seeing games developed with it now. Developers (especially ones with big budgets and all the caveats they come with) don’t want to ship a game with the latest and greatest engine if there’s kinks to be worked out. This is why you still see Unreal 4 in games released today.
It almost makes me think the higher ups got paid to kill Unity. All the C-suite got golden parachutes if they kill the project now.
Then I remember OGL and the fat lack of competition they had, and remember C-suite often don’t know what they’re actually in charge of. Malice vs stupidity and such.
The C suites have nothing to lose. Best case, they make more money, worst case they get replaced and hired as a C suite by some other company.
Epic donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Godot when Unity was being dumb this summer, so either they think an open-source project is on the brink of making their competitor unprofitable and collapse, and think enough of the studios jumping ship will come to Unreal to cover that sum, or they’re concerned that someone will start enforcing antitrust laws and want something to point at to say they’re not a monopoly.
Epic is just a troll company. They donated to Godot when it served as a jab in the side of their competition (unity). Their entire business model is to inflict Stockholm Syndrome on their users via free games.
Their entire business model is Fortnite
Both. Definitely both.
I think they saw it as an opportunity to wash their image. “Look, we’re the good guys” kind of thing.
Both and also Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
You are 100% correct of course. I do want to add that depending on the works/software of others is also a risk as well. It’s the tradeoff made when the developer decided not to build an engine from scratch. If the game engine company becomes shaky, the developers have to weigh that in when looking at the cost of switching or not. Or maybe everything will be fine.
there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow.
Honestly, that’s the price they pay we pay for not doing things right the first time.
I’m not sure why people have convinced themselves that they can just ignore problems and they will go away. Software licensing is an issue that pervades all development. Ignoring it is asinine and will lead you to wasting time and money on bullshit.
When I was picking an engine to learn, I chose Godot. Now I’m not bitching when Unity is dying because I said it was going to die years ago. People just like to ignore problems until they can’t.
Godot is fine for solo/very small indies and people trying to learn gamedev, but it is not ready quite yet. Most devs still are stuck using proprietary engines.
Lmao they really don’t want anyone to keep using their engine anymore
Go help out Godot or perhaps Bevy, financially, by contributing code &/or bug reports or by any other means you may be capable of.
When Unity dies you’ll be thankful you did.LGPL requires distributing the license with any code. I imagine unity does that with the core code, but it would be difficult to enforce that for assets distributed in their store, which they would be liable for legally. I imagine this will be resolved, but I no longer use Unity so idfc
From my understanding there are other third-party assets in the Unity store which use the LGPL but are not being removed.
Is there any information on them being given a pass?
Generally stuff like this goes in waves. I have no experience with the unity store, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out they haven’t always (and still might not…) required “apps” to list their licensing. Meaning this would be a somewhat manual effort done by a severely reduced staff.
And I’ll just add on that I expect this to happen to the other “asset” stores. In industry, “GPL is cancer” and “LGPL is herpes”. GPL can straight up “kill” a project and LGPL is usually a mass of headaches that are mostly manageable but can still “cause problems” at times.
I expect they will be unless they’re small enough to fly under the radar
Not just license. You also need to link to it as a shared library and allow users to replace it with their own build of the library. Meaning you can’t use stuff like DRM and anticheats.
Yup fair point I didn’t know that. Unity presumably does this with dlls that a technical user can easily swap out. In principle an asset store script could do this, but it would be very difficult to verify and enforce so I can see why they’d just ban the license outright as a CYA thing.
Maybe the answer is to distribute a vlc dll separately and only ship a linking/driving script via the asset store.
Technically it can be statically linked, but then you would need to provide artifacts (for example, object files for the non-LGPL modules) enabling the end user to “recombine or relink” the program with a modified version of the LGPL code.
Dynamic linking is usually simpler, though. And the DRM issues apply either way.
Not exactly. The LGPL inherits the methods of conveying source code from section 6 of the GPL, which has a number of different options. You can bundle the source code along with the compiled version, but you can also do it simply by including an offer the end user can redeem to get a copy of the source. For example you could include a link to the source code.
Okay but what’s the real reason?
💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵
Yes but how
Other folks in this thread are speculating that they want to put their own video player in the store.
And charge extra?
Well the VLC one was free, and I’m guessing theirs won’t be.
Just report every other package that includes ffmpeg.
Their asset store will dry up faster than a puddle of water in Death Valley if you do that. ◉‿◉
Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right?
cough mpv cough
We already know mpv causes upper respiratory infection, cover your mouth already.
Yeah, VLC is great and has been great for a long time. But the MPV-based stuff is amazing too and just seems faster, cleaner, etc. Which I’m sure is due to being much more focused, just using ffmpeg, without decades of legacy code, etc.
My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux
I don’t need integration with some obscure external timing system by default like VLC offers, and that kind of thing. But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.
Or in a couple of cases they seem like more of a mess than VLC.
My biggest problem has been that I find nearly all of the MPV-based players I’ve used (mpv-player itself, or stuff like IINA or Celluloid) either have a massive lack of configuration options, overly minimal UI, or both. On Windows, Mac, or Linux
Have you checked the manual? The amount of options is staggering, bordering on esoteric. The only catch is most of them need to be setup either through CLI or .ini files.
But it’s weird that so many players don’t offer you the ability to enable basic plugins. Or change playback speed. Or configure keybinds. Or continue playing the next file in a directory automatically. Or even offer the ability to display the most basic info about the file being played, like codecs. Etc etc.
I can’t say anything for the frontends, but you can use plugins for basically anything in mpv itself, including the issues you’ve listed. Again, you need to setup the whole thing and read the manual, but it’s there. And yes, I see the irony in all the effort needed to do basic stuff like this when something like VLC just works™, but to me that’s the beauty of mpv, it’s basic and minimalistic yet you can make it work however you like given time and patience.
Btw you can check the file info by pressing
ion the keyboard while playing something.
Off topic: ff2mpv is awesome. It supports many video sites (I believe everything youtube-dl does) and opens the video on a page/link in an external mpv window.
This helped me mirror a video without downloading to read the embedded subtitles (why uploads a mirrored video with subtitles?). Also playback speed and all other advanced features mpv supports are really useful
MPC-BE!
Why does VLC need to be in the Unity store when you can download it directly from videolan.org?
It’s for including it in Unity games as a component.
I thought we all agreed that building games in Unity was a bad idea.
This is further proof of that.
lots of games in active development still use it while others who were/are planning to use it will find this information useful in evaluating whether their project can still move forward using unity. not everyone can just choose to not use unity, as they’re already too heavily invested to pivot away.
Many people did, but humanity is not a hive mind. “We all” never agree on anything with 100% unanimity.
I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. I distinctly remember the meeting, there were cookies and Tim’s grandma made those brownies with the peanut butter M&Ms, and then we all voted and everyone agreed. It might not have been unanimous but everyone agreed to abide by the decision of the group.
In fact, I remember you were there. We talked about shopping for gifts, and how hard it is to find new indie music these days. You were wearing a sweatshirt with the cool design that everybody liked.
I think I’d remember wearing a sweatshirt, and I’m not at all into indie music, so that must have been someone else.
I’m mostly deer so I guess I don’t get invited to humanity’s all-hands meetings where decisions like this get made. :(
It was a joke
Yes we do.
Not enough of us, it seems.
It is.
Oh 🤦♂️
I saw Unity and talk about open licences and just assumed that this was talk about Ubuntu and the interface that comes with it…
Not a game developer but I have a hunch that its for displaying videos within the game. Like a cut scene.
Ohhh no, VLC has some problems with… who’s this Unity fellow again?
Wasn’t that the hivemimd robot guy from Mass Effect
No no. He’s the evil robot from the Marvel universe.
Nope, its the hive mind lady from Rick and Morty
Nope it’s that EA game with Creed the boxer
Some of these comments are wack. “Just stop using Unity” bro some people don’t get that choice.
Brb let me completely rewrite all my unity projects and learn unreal in a single day
You’re gonna take a whole day? Why you slackin so much? Git gud scrub!
Unity has an app store?
So does most popular game engines (like Unreal and Godot) to give game developers easier access to certain content they can use in their games.
Godot doesn’t have an asset store yet actually, but they’re planning on releasing one soon.
They do have an Asset Library currently, but it is all free, thus not a store.
I went out for a walk earlier, not too far just couple of miles to clear my head. Get some fresh air. Anyway, regardless of how many signs my council like to spend money on to display the consequence of leaving your dogs shit, people still do it. Fact is, I saw a dog shit and it’s getting harder to differentiate that dog shit and Unity.
