Comment 1 for bug 184555

I've chosen this bug about including the Adaptive multi-rate compression (AMR) support in Ubuntu because getting this into gstreamer (although unlikely) would make media files that use AMR play OK in Ubuntu.

With Hardy, trying to play 3GP files (and presumably AMR audio only files) pops up a dialog without proposing download of the codec:

"An error ocurred - The playback of this movie requires the following decoders which are not installed:
Adaptive Multi Rate (AMR) decoder
H.263 decoder"

Direct support of AMR in Ubuntu is not likely to happen anytime soon, after some searching I think the clear explanation is the licensing and patents surrounding that codec.

To my knowledge VLC, mplayer and ffmpeg implement their own codec support, yet they would have the same licensing problem (dsitribution).

For more information see:

Discussion about AMR support in XineLib (2005):
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=18bc366d0504220156aac84e2%40mail.gmail.com

AMR reference implementation in Linux (see Legal disclaimer about distribution):
http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/amr

AMR's entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_multi-rate_compression

Marking this as "whishlist, incomplete" as the licensing issue may be resolved later on but there are work arounds available online such as converting 3GP to other supported formats.