To purchase an MPEG-2 licence visit our (relaunched) store.
This will allow you to play MPEG-2 material from XBMC and omxplayer, which hasn’t been an available feature before now. (This is why we’re very grateful to have Dom on board our engineering team, because he’s clever.) But that’s what we’ve done – so 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. A blanket licence for everybody would cost the Foundation money it simply doesn’t have, and not everybody with a Raspberry Pi would use that licence an individual licence for an individual user to download and use with an individual machine is a surprisingly finickity thing to engineer. We’ve spent some months working out how on earth to square this particular circle. And many, many of you have existing media libraries which are encoded using MPEG-2, and don’t fancy transcoding gigabites of stuff to H.264. Thing is, a bunch of you went and bought the Raspberry Pi in February and immediately started using it as your primary media centre. 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. Providing that licence would have raised the price of every Raspberry Pi by roughly 10%, and we simply weren’t able to justify that when we held it up against the educational goals of the Foundation. One of the things that we had to regretfully dismiss as an option was an MPEG-2 decode licence for every unit. If you’ve been following this website since we launched it last summer, you’ll probably be aware that we had to make some hard decisions about exactly what we could include on the Raspberry Pi if we were to meet our extremely low target price.
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