Oliver, this is actually a strong argument in favor of open-sourcing at least the linux version.
You are right, however, to want to make sure you get the "right" license, especially in the light of Jacobsen v. Katzer, which underscores the value of making sure you choose the right license.
I suspect the majority of OSS supporters would advocate for the GPL, I am not necessarily that strongly opinionated on the matter, but it is a very strong license, and very good at both protexting your interestes, as well as those that contribute.
Also note that just becuase you pick a particular license, doesn't mean you can't decide to change to a different license later (that's arguably one of the stregnths of the Sun license; contributors must assign copyright to you, which makes it easier to change the license terms down the road, but sometimes it can discourage contribution). You can also release different versions under different licenses if you wanted to. For example, release the Linux version under GPL, but keep the windows one the way it is.
Finally, I would suggest releasing a plug-in SDK, and/or publishing the API. Again, you could release the SDK as GPL without 'contaminating' the 'core application', which would encourage more people to write plugins, which might solve your issue. There aren't tons of video player for linux, but a couple of them are very flexible, and are really designed to be used from within other programs. Mplayer is more or less a "standard" for that, and VLC is available under Linux, and has pretty good codec support.
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