Money For Nothing and the Codecs For Free 206
Davis Freeberg writes "In an in depth discussion on the codec industry, CoreCodec CEO and Matroska Foundation board member Dan Marlin shares his thoughts on the growing popularity of the MKV container, confusion in the marketplace between X.264/MKV and DivXHD and weighs in on a controversial decision by Microsoft to block third party filter support in future versions of Windows media player. His interview offers a behind the scenes look at an important piece of technology that is helping to power the P2P movement. It also raises the prickly question of whether or not Microsoft is abusing their OS monopoly, in order to rein in competition within the codec industry."
More on Streaming? Interview? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have liked to hear more on how he plans to break into the streaming market when everyone is going proprietary on that for the sake of DRM. He mentions it briefly but does he have any definite plans?
...
Davis Freeberg, if you're reading this could you introduce Marlin to the editors for a Slashdot Interview [slashdot.org]? I can think of a lot things to ask him as I'm sure other users could
Re:More on Streaming? Interview? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More on Streaming? Interview? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have liked to hear more on how he plans to break into the streaming market when everyone is going proprietary on that for the sake of DRM.
Everyone ? Do you mean Dailymotion and Youtube going vorbis+theora for their streaming needs doesn't count ?
Hedgemaster 1.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a perfect example of salesmanship, optimism and double-speak. Excerpts from TFA:
we do plan to open source pretty much our entire eco-system,
Pretty much eh? That sounds interesting. Where can I sign up for your newsletter?
if the business warrants it
If eh? That's a pretty important article leading that phrase. I could get really excited without that "if."
and right now it looks like does
Ohhh the winds are blowing your way eh? Well, lets wait and see. Your investors might have another opinion on the matter. Still kind of exciting. I'm feeling a little wobbly in the knees and all!
We can still open source it and monetize it and also release our encoder as well,
You mean like how Sun tried to make Java free-ish? History is working against you on this one. But, you know, crazy things have happened before, so I'm even more excited. Not only are my knees wobbly, but my stomach's got a few butterflies in it!
but at the same time weâ(TM)re very cautious about what we do.
Ohh there's the double-speak. You were getting me all fired up imagining relatively simple playback on a plurality of devices until that line. Was I supposed to ignore that one?
Like Matroska, the Haali media splitter may not be open source, but it is free
Coitus interuptus Mr. Streaming Codec dude. Coitus interuptus.....
Ohhh you mean like those other binary blobs that work *so* well? Is this free like so many 'free' applications I download off the internet that are supposed to speed up my windows machine? I get all these adverts popping up everywhere and that's just the beginning.
Re:Unfortunately, this one may work (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem there is that locking out third party codecs doesn't do anything to solve the problem because 99% of users won't know that the codec/plugin they're told to download won't work. You could even find a way, I'm sure, to allow the video to play only after they've installed your malware if you wanted to be really sneaky about it.
Re:MKV == critical mass? (Score:3, Interesting)
Popcorn Hour suffers by not including local storage (though it can be added later), or a disk reader. Not having used one, I can't comment on their interface. They're closer than anybody though.
Re:Hack (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting... one solution to the DRM problem is to make older codecs obsolete so no one can play the content that has gotten out into the wild.
Continuous obsolescence in hardware and software is the goal since then every time they release a new version, everyone has to buy it. So they can release new versions more often.
There are tools and appliances made -- out of steel, in the 1980's that are just now broken. Replacements for them break much faster (Hot water heaters, stoves, gas dryers are good examples-- google whirlpool appliances at home depot and lowes-- lots of angry people- even after market warranties didn't help them).
Likewise, there are software tools written in the 80's that still work today. Cobol, C utilities like Grep, Awk, etc. Meanwhile, our visual basic application is obsolete after 5 years. The business is risking complete failure by putting off replacing it since writing a new version in the language du jour is going to cost a lot.
Re:Unfortunately, this one may work (Score:4, Interesting)
I think there's a good point in the article about the monopolistic problems at stake:
When J.D. Rockefeller set out to monopolize the oil industry, there were several crucial areas where he attacked. He knew that he couldnâ(TM)t control all of the oil fields because it was literally bubbling out of the ground, but what he could control was the distribution method for getting oil to the end customer.
It's also particularly noteworthy when talking about media. For example, what do we tend to call those companies that control the music business? "Record companies". All those companies essentially started out as just the companies that manufactured the records, but it was the control of the distribution media of music that put them in control of the entire music industry. That's why record companies are so afraid of people buying music online. Online sales give transfer a lot of control over distribution from the record companies to the online retailers, which could eventually make record companies completely obsolete.
I know this sounds like I'm going off-topic, but it's very important to know this when you're talking about Microsoft and media formats. Microsoft spent a lot of money developing their own media formats and DRM, and then pushing those formats and DRM on everyone. From the record companies' point of view, this was a good thing because it gave them increased control over online distribution, but what they may not have noticed is that it also gave Microsoft a foot in the door. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft stood to gain a piece of the action in the media industry, as well as another monopoly that could reenforce their OS monopoly.
What seems to have tripped them up is (a) the most popular portable media player not supporting their media formats; and (b) the music industry finally dropping DRM. If not for those two things, we might be in a real nightmare situation by now.
Re:Hack (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever used CoreAVC?
Yeah. It was okay.
This is the codec to use on Windows to play H.264 - its performance is unmatched and allows for 1080p playback on some surprisingly weak hardware, where e.g. ffmpeg doesn't even come close.
And my hardware-enabled H.264 decoding video card does better and I don't have to buy any extra codecs. And the hardware decoding works on Linux with ffmpeg/mplayer as well through the VPDAU framework.
And in its recent versions, it even (finally) makes use of CUDA in nVidia GPUs, lowering the CPU load by quite a bit again.
Wow so after 2 years of promising they finally got hardware decoding when there have already been hardware-enabled H.264 decoders already for quite some time both on Windows and more recently for Linux.
And it is absolutely decently priced
Or I could just use my free version of mplayer with VPDAU and not pay anything and get better performance.
Also: Does Microsoft even ship a H.264 codec?
In Windows 7 they do which is why CoreCodec is up in arms over the whole Media Foundation situation.
Re:More on Streaming? Interview? (Score:3, Interesting)
EBML is (almost) what XML always should have been.
XML:
Pros: Human readable
Cons: Slow to parse, inconvenient to write parsers for, space-inefficient.
Binary XML:
Pros: Easy to write fast, simple parsers for, space efficient, allows easy random access into the file.
Cons: Needs specialised editor (i.e. an 'XML editor' rather than any old text editor).
I'd much much much rather have the latter.
Re:MKV == critical mass? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:MKV == critical mass? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that I look at it, it's a pretty impressive list:
http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/index.html [matroska.org]
Somehow I've never felt the need to embed the metadata in the video file itself. I usually make an .nfo to go along with it.
Re:MKV == critical mass? (Score:3, Interesting)
My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV. Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?
Well, considering that all of those you list have a stake in closed architectures, I'm not too surprised. Neither Apple nor Sony has ever shown much interest in supporting open standards. Have you yet discovered that your PS3 also won't play all flavors of DivX/XviD [avsforum.com] even in the AVI container?
While some DVD players support DivX and often won't cough with XviD, the manufacturers did so to enable you to play the now-defunct DivX discs. I took back a Sony DVD player and replaced it with a Panny because the Sony had no DivX support and wouldn't play my XviD-encoded programs. Sony wants everyone to conform to the .mp4 container that they prefer.
In answer to your question, how about a COWON A3 [cowonamerica.com] for starters? It even supports 720p/H.264 Matroska files (I have a lot of those). Or maybe some of these devices [wikipedia.org]?
If you buy products that are designed to close off your options, then you can't really complain when you find your choices are more limited. While it's possible to argue that hardware manufacturers have been slow to support Matroska because of its small market share, I think it's even more plausible that manufacturers prefer to support formats that give them more control. Not to mention that large manufacturers are much more comfortable dealing with something like the MPEG LA [microsoft.com] than with an open format like Matroska. They probably have a hard time getting their heads around supporting something that doesn't required licensing fees. (Like in the case of Linux, business types usually think "free" = "inferior".)