The Raspberry Pi Foundation has started selling licences for MPEG-2 and VC-1 video codecs, after complaints from users who turned the cheap Linux computer into a media centre. Because the £25 Linux computer was developed as an aid for teaching kids to program, the 's designers decided not to include an MPEG-2 support on the grounds of cost. However, this left many with media libraries full of MPEG-2 videos unable to play them, unless they transcoded gigabytes of data — something they were vociferously unhappy about. The Raspberry Pi Foundation answered those pleas on Friday, revealing that it has struck deals that allow individuals to buy the licences if they want to add them to the H.264 support baked into the Raspberry Pi's hardware. 'From today, you'll be able to purchase an MPEG-2 decode licence which will be tied to your Raspberry Pi's unique serial number. This will allow you to play MPEG-2 material from XBMC and omxplayer, which hasn't been an available feature before now,' foundation spokeswoman Liz Upton wrote in a. The licence for MPEG-2 — a longstanding and popular format used by many to encode ripped DVDs, Blu-ray titles and TV shows — costs £2.40 on the.

At the same time, fans can now also buy a licence for VC-1, Microsoft's WMV video codec, for £1.20. 'Providing that licence would have raised the price of every Raspberry Pi by roughly 10 percent, and we simply weren't able to justify that when we held it up against the educational goals of the foundation,' Upton said. 'Our initial expectation was that most of you would buy the Raspberry Pi for educational purposes, and that you wouldn't mind that MPEG-2 wasn't available. As a bonus, the team discovered while digging into video codec licences that they already had the right to offer H.264 encoding alongside the decoding in Raspberry Pi.

The relevant OpenMAX components for encoding have now been enabled by default in the latest firmware, Upton said. And in another move destined to please those with Raspberry Pi-powered media centres, Upton noted that, and OSes now have support for Consumer Electronics Control (CEC). This means people will be able to use a single remote control for that media centre, television or any other connected device. Related Topics. By registering you become a member of the CBS Interactive family of sites and you have read and agree to the, and. Corel Draw 13 Free Download Full Version With Crack For Windows 7. You agree to receive updates, alerts and promotions from CBS and that CBS may share information about you with our marketing partners so that they may contact you by email or otherwise about their products or services.

Have anyone received a Raspberry Pi yet? I was wondering if it is possible to unlock all the extra features of the GPU like mpeg2 decoding. Is it 'hackable'? People over the Raspberry Pi believe such a thing is almost impossible. Become a realist, stay a dreamer. Purchasing License Buy a license from Raspberry Pi site at Before doing so you'll need to get the serial number from.

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Hi All I have owned a Pi since the release date so I am fairly familiar with it but I can't for the life of me get the MPEG2 license to work! I'm almost certain its something I'm doing wrong since I can't find anyone else with the same issue.

So this is what I done to install it: SSH'd to my Pi and run 'sudo nano /boot/config.txt' Paste the license from the email at the end of the file Hit CTRL+X to save changes, confirmed the overwrite Rebooted. I have run vcgencmd codec_enabled mpg2 many times and I cant get it to be enabled. I should probably also mention this is a clean install, no overclock, new SD card & I have double checked the serial used was correct.

Excelsior Bicycle Serial Numbers there. Can anyone shed some light on this weird occurrence? Thanks in advance, Wayne. Another Simon wrote:I'm more interested in editing than spoofing, but I guess this is getting a bit off topic. I started a question on the raspberry pi stack exchange site yesterday, because it is a specific question with a specific answer: Dom has access to all the source code, the Videocore debugger and many closed VC specific tools.

And releasing any information to allow you to change the serial number would break the mechanism for codec licencing, so will never happen. There is NO need to change the serial number. The only reasons you might want to do it are nefarious - to crack the licencing scheme, thereby costing the Foundation a valuable source of income, and perhaps causing MPLA to revoke their agreements with the Foundation to provide licences. That would then mean the price of the Raspi would have to increased for everyone, as we would need to provide the MP4 licence for all, since the licencing scheme would be broken.

So, is that what you want to do? Because I think that's not a very nice thing at all. Jamesh wrote:There is NO need to change the serial number. The only reasons you might want to do it are nefarious - to crack the licencing scheme, thereby costing the Foundation a valuable source of income, and perhaps causing MPLA to revoke their agreements with the Foundation to provide licences.

That would then mean the price of the Raspi would have to increased for everyone, as we would need to provide the MP4 licence for all, since the licencing scheme would be broken. So, is that what you want to do?

Because I think that's not a very nice thing at all. That is exactly what I said. It would be the only reason.