End Use License

[Mark McCrea]

I first found VideoLan in about March, and about a month later my employer asked me to create a CD that we could distribute with a player and a few movies for our customers to be able to see what our products are like.

I thought that VLC would make an excellent program for this use. I have begun to create an interface using MMB (MultiMedia Builder, a program for creating interfaces for autorunning CDs, and similar projects).

I have read through the GPL License and other documentation provided with VLC and I believe that it is within the limits of the license agreement that I may use the interface created in MMB to access VLC (MMB starts up VLC, but instead of being in its own window it comes up inside of the MMb window) to play the movies from the disk when a copy of VLC is on the CD to play the movie.

I intend to include on the disk a .txt created in Notepad to tell people what Videolan and VLC are and direct them to the webpage (http://www.videolan.org), as well as the Windows and, space permiting, the Mac VLC installtion files as downloaded from the website.

If anyone sees any legal or technical issues with this proposed plan I would like to hear from them. We distribute the CDs to to our customers and dealers around North America and Austrailia mainly. VLC is not altered except that the people don't install the program itself, just run it off of a CD, and with the previously mentioned interface change.

Thank-you for your time in reading this post.

[The DJ]

I think it would be nice if you would also say that VLC is licensed as GPL software, and provide the GPL license as well (appended to the file?).

I think beyond that it's ok, though i'll ask someone else to be sure.

[Guest]

With the way the project is shaping up I am thinking of an alteration to how I will get this done. I am thinking that I will create a skin for VLC that will hold much of the information and the multimedia builder will just moderate the exchange from user non-video to video run by VLC.

The skin will have my employers logo on it, and possibly contain some other information that is owned by the company. The previous skins for VLC will still be availible as will all other VLC information. I plan on having a splash screen when this opens saying that VLC is made by VideoLAN, the skin I have created is made by myself, my employers logo/video/etc are his and neither my or my employer as associated with VideoLAN, and that VLC is licensed as a GPL as per The DJ's suggestion and provide a copy of the GPL license agreement for viewing.

I wanted to check that this is an proper use of VLC within the GPL and that no one who had developed the product had any problems with this.

If someone knows an email or person I should try to get ahold of about the use of VLC that would be great.

Mark McCrea

[Sam Hocevar]

This is perfectly fine. You should provide a 3-year offer to send the VLC source code upon request to your users, just in case they don't have Internet access (alternately, you may put the source code on the CD-Rom if you have enough room). You need not provide all the other skins if you think yours is functional enough. The splash screen is not mandatory, though very appreciated.