On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:48:28 +0200
Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Audio and video codecs including flash are preinstalled. We are
going
the path of Linux Mint to make user experience best as possible right
out of the box, and for not that means also including few non-open
components. As soon as they become redundant we will drop them for
open source ones. But unfortunately for now there must be few
proprietary pieces in order to make linux destop usable for non geeks
and non developers ie. regular users.
I did a search a few years ago, and I think the patents on mpeg
start to expire next year and continue to expire in dribs and drabs
over the next few years. I suspect that is part of the reason for the
new proprietary video standard being proposed for html5. ;-)
So you should be home free in a couple of years.