Council of the EU Says "We Cannot Support Linux"

An anonymous reader writes "The Council of the EU has a streaming service so that we can watch its meetings — but the service can only be accessed by Mac or MS Windows users. This is because they employ WMV format for the videos. In the FAQ they express a really strange opinion about this: 'The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.' An online petition has been set up to create pressure to convince the EU council to change its service to one that is platform independent."

Youtube!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or should I say Eutube!

*ducks*

IT'S OK

[scenestar]

We don't support the EU either.

A blatant lie to cover up for laziness...

[Savage-Rabbit]

From where I sit, it looks like a blatant lie to cover up for laziness.

<complete_nonsense>
You don't know the EU very well do you? You see this has nothing to do with laziness. If the EU replaces it's WMV streaming systems with a competing product it will result in 68 shirt and tie wearing MCSEs with nice conservative Bill Gates haircuts being replaced by a couple of hairy bucktoothed nerds with a nasty armpit malodor problem and the fashions sense of a Portuguese donkey wrangler. So this whole mess is really all about French objections because of the effect such a change would have on the already low fashion standards of EU employees and all the other EU member countries fears that it might make the unemployment situation in the European MCSE community any worse since the job security of the European MCSE community is already badly threatened by the way Linux looks set to exterminate Windows from the EU's desktop computer market.
</complete_nonsense>

Re:Realplayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's morally illegal.

Re:Please don't do this

[killjoe]

Why not real?

Re:Realplayer?

[OldJohnno]

Sure, let's use ---buffering--- RealPlayer, it always---buffering---works---buffering---perfectly for me with---buffering----streaming---buffering---video. ..

Re:Ogg Theora?

[Divebus]

Ogg is open. Anyone can contribute to making it better, even Microsoft.

I almost choked when I read that. I'm SURE Microsoft would love to make it better... can't wait to see that popup window:

Error -127: Non-Standard Codec
You must download the MS-OGG compatibility extension
Press any key to continue. Press any other key to exit.

Re:Hello, there are open-source players for WMV3

[Raumkraut]

Splitters!

Re:Hello, there are open-source players for WMV3

[Ragzouken]

Don't forget the European people's front!