On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 23:31 +0000, George Wright wrote: > Is it the lack of (legal) ability to modify Real's source code, to do a > quick (legal) apt-get/yum/whatever install to get the player, ... or > your ability to redistribute the player, that's the problem?
I elided the bit about running my own server in order that I could say 'all of the above'. They're fairly closely tied together. The ability to build the codec, modify the code and distribute my changes is what makes it possible for me to port it to esoteric platforms such as the OpenMoko phone which should be arriving some time in the next few weeks. It's also what makes it possible for me to make improvements to the code, but I lack the wit for that kind of thing so it doesn't bother me too much that I'm prevented. And of course it's what makes it possible for the player to _be_ in the standard software repositories. I agree with your assessment that Real seems to be the best non-free AV format at the moment. That's just because it's fairly ubiquitous, which mostly offsets the fact that it's not open. As long as we're not being particularly security-conscious, that is. > If your overall argument is 'the BBC should always offer AV content in > at least one format that plays in free software', then that's a > different question. I would certainly make that argument, yes. But perhaps not quite as vociferously as the "DRM + Windows-only is unacceptable" argument. :) Real is a passable compromise. At least it lets me play the 'listen again' content, and also lets me save it as a wave file and then put it onto a CD for my partner, who is covered by the ERA scheme. But I'm still at the mercy of a commercial entity who may or may not choose to continue building for my platform of choice (thankfully they do choose to do so at the moment -- I've recently been working with them to get Linux/PowerPC back into their build farm.) Because those libraries aren't built with the rest of my operating system, they miss out on the automatic stack-smashing detection and other security features which GCC offers, which are particularly important for network-facing code. But at least they work. For now. > So for you, the codec works, but you don't like the fact that it's not > really legal to get it working? The Real support is legal -- it's just that I'm forced to enter an agreement with them in order to download it, and I can't port it to new platforms. It's my MP3 support which isn't legal, because of the patents -- which is why it isn't shipped by default in Fedora. But Ogg is. At this stage, I think Ogg is _more_ widely available than Real is. The barrier to that, in the past, was the lack of a decent fixed-point decoder. But we've had one of those for some time now. As previously observed, RealPlayer also supports Ogg. So wouldn't the Real users cope just fine if you switched to WMV+Ogg instead of WMV+RA? > Here's the ref: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/msg03400.html Thanks. Doesn't do much to negate my assertion that it's a recursive argument. "Hey, we select Ogg as the default for a minority of people, and a minority of people then use it". Go figure :) In fact I think that information is out of date. Last week when I went to the Virgin site, it played automatically. Today it doesn't seem to work unless I seek out the Ogg stream manually. > But in the meantime, we'd have to do a lot of work on having > > WMV > Real > Ogg > > and with a limited resource for hardware, admin and people - something's > got to give - especially when 99.99% of current listeners wouldn't see > any need to change, and most wouldn't see any benefit (without getting > into the quality of the codecs..) I appreciate that, but I believe it's very important to have at least _one_ freely implementable format. Especially given the diversity of mobile devices which are starting to spring up recently. > So it's the binary blob/codec bit that's the problem? I don't like it > either, tbh, but this (cross platform players, source for most of the > containers available, legally pre-installed players on some platforms) > is all a long way from DRM and Windows only. Again, like I said, this is > why I jumped in - and now I'm talking about ogg :( Yes, it's a long way from DRM and Windows only. But the underlying principles in both cases seem to be very similar. In both cases, the BBC is failing to make the content available in an unencumbered, freely implementable format. -- dwmw2 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
