On Feb 8, 2008, at 12:04 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
It puts us into a precarious political and ethical situation. So
I see
very little good from it at this point.
I'll make a bolder statement... there is very little good associated
with any issue involving patent encumbered codecs or data formats
generally. I don't care what we do, we're not going to end up with a
good outcome. I'd like to actually have something like miro in
fedora, making use of codeina, so that we can actually have a
constructive forward looking conversation with miro and its sponsors
about going the next step and actually helping to produce good open
format editting tools to start bootstrapping our way out of this
frelling mess. I'm very unhappy on where miro stance on 'format wars'
They've taken a complete pass on the very issue. If we take a
complete pass as well, we'll give developers in this space a reason to
ignore us.
I think that Miro probably did the right thing on this topic. They
pushed the problem down the operating system. Also, a video player
that didn't play any of the video that's available on the web doesn't
seem like a very compelling offering, does it? Those guys are doing
what Mozilla did - building a consumer brand around an experience and
leveraging as much of the existing infrastructure as possible (OS
support for codecs, Mozilla for an engine, etc) and taking it directly
to the public.
I'm not sure why we get to project our concerns onto their project.
Mozilla got the advantage of at least starting with an open format and
continues to improve it vs. Miro where they have only closed content
to consume and are trying to make it as open as possible. Miro won't
have leverage until they have a lot of users and open formats _also
_provide better tools or something better that actually creates value
or people creating content with that format.
The whole thing blows big monkey chunks. The fact that you need this
crap to make flash usable is going to be an increasing more and more
painful, because in the bright kickass future of web 2.0 and online
desktop....we are screwed because flash is an integral part of this
stuff when it comes to video.
Yup. And the fact that it's hard to get any of the browser vendors
other than Mozilla and Opera to even consider including free-as-in-
speech codecs is a sign that we've got a problem. Apple will likely
be the first to ship <video> support in the browser and I'll bet that
you can guess which formats it will support. Opera might be second,
or Mozilla might be, it's hard to tell. But that doesn't help the
fact that Flash is going to be the main source for video for quite a
while to come. It's the only solution that's available everywhere.
I can't believe that the solution here is to punish users because
we're pissed about the state of open video. I believe that the
solution has to be to focus on building great tools for creating video
for open formats, taking the format itself to a place where the others
fear going and making it so dead easy for anyone to create and consume
video in those formats that they take the web by storm. You can't win
by stopping people from doing something. You can only win by giving
them the tools so that the right thing is also the natural thing.
(Oh, and it's going to have work on more than just Linux.)
What if codeina was reworked such that by default we only made no-cost
items available by default after the education page?
What if codeina was reworked such that different service providers
could drop in support for their codecs? For example, so that
livna/rpmfusion could configure codeina when the release rpm was
installed?
If the Fluendo can task people to halp make those sorts of changes
isn't worth inviting them to a discussion?
Is there actually another vendor for this stuff that's also legal?
--Chris
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