Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
lemmy.world
VLC for Unity integration

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

  • yetAnotherUser@lemmy.caEnglish
    198·
    10 months ago

    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
    • jrgd@lemm.eeEnglish
      781·
      10 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.

    • Wrench@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8129·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • computergeek125@lemmy.worldEnglish
        202·
        10 months ago

        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.