Two Chinese Video Encoders | Hacker News Reader

Two Chinese Video Encoders

blog.sesse.net

15 pointskierank3 comments

There is this for interested http://www.openhisiipcam.org/ They seem to be targeting $10-20 1080@30 IP camera modules available on aliexpress, you can also get them on ebay with $10 markup.

Lower model/older chipset $80 lan solution https://www.ebay.com/itm/H-265-H-264-HDMI-Video-Encoder-Vide...

$190 wifi one https://www.ebay.com/itm/Wireless-WIFI-Hi3516A1080p-60fps-En...

How do you enforce GPL in China? Is it enforceable at all?

> GPL violations are rampant, of course. Both ship Linux with no license text (even though UHE265-1-Mini comes with a paper manual) and no source in sight. Both ship FFmpeg, although URayTech has configured it in LGPL mode, unlike LinkPi, which has a full-on GPL build and links to it from various proprietary libraries. (URayTech ships busybox; I don't think LinkPi does, but I could be mistaken.) LinkPi's FFmpeg build also includes FDK-AAC, which is GPL-incompatible, so the entire shebang is non-redistributable. So both are bad, but the ENC1 is definitely worse. I've sent a request to support for source code, but I have zero belief that I'll receive any.

It's hard to enforce any kind of IP protection in China. Some years ago I worked for a company that outsourced some PCB layout and manufacturing to a reputed company in China. A few months into production we were made aware of similar devices with identical error codes and messages being sold locally. We had no luck prosecuting it.

Their IP system is strange in that you can file a patent in China even if there is prior art and is being used elsewhere in the world. This means you see interesting incidents - a patent we filed some years ago with apparently little to zero commercial value suddenly popped up in China, filed by some company from Shenzhen. It was apparently a word for word copy of what we had filed, and the diagrams were identical too.

Though there are tall claims about how IP protection has "improved" in China, they have a long way to go and a lot of broken trust to rebuild.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com