2009/6/7 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
I think there are two issues for a proprietary -> non-proprietary converter:
- The conversion software itself must be FLOSS.
- The format being converted must have an open specification (Flash being a
good example of one that might be allowed to be converted).
The first is easy: ffmpeg. It converts pretty much anything to pretty much anything. This is what I mean when I say that the technical side of such a thing would verge on the trivial. (Modulo a sufficiently CPU-endowed box for transcoding.)
The second - if ffmpeg have worked out the format, it's hardly any sort of secret any more.
I think it's something that would be worth doing to get more educational material into free formats and in a repository (Commons) that could spread them to the world, even if they did start in an encumbered format.
- d.