The VideoLAN Forums

I am developing a commercial C# application which has several features. One of them concerns video playback. At the moment we use DirectShow, but with codec issues and outdated API's I would like to migrate to VLC. The WPF component at http://vlcdotnet.codeplex.com/ is licensed under MS-GPL and the libvlc that has to be used is of course GPL. Am I correct that I cannot use them, even if I ship the sources of these libraries with my installer, without making my app GPL and distributing my source code? I don't plan to modify the libraries, I just want to use them for playback.

Is it possible to work around this? The video playback is a vital component of my application, but it can be disabled. So if I would give users the option to download the required libraries when installing my application, would that be enough?

Or is any use completely out of the question?

If you do actually include GPL'd version of LibVLC in an application, then the application becomes GPL'd. Merely using (if it happens to be installed already and separately) however is probably legal.

I don't know what's the status with switching LibVLC to LGPL other than that it is not completed yet.

And I don't know what MS-GPL is.