On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 04:43:08PM +0000, Neil Darlow wrote: > Isn't it about time we had an open standards-based authoring/playing > tool-chain (with full support for menus) so we can coerce hardware > manufacturers into adding support for open formats into their products?
How do you intend to "coerce hardware manufacturers"? What incentive would they have to support Yet Another Incompatible Format? What is the demand? In particular, if there aren't freely-available players for them then such formats would be lost before they start, no one is going to be authoring a DVD which only they can play. This is true of formats like Ogg/Vorbis for audio still. Very few of the people I know who I would want to send audio files have even heard of Ogg, let alone have software and hardware to play it (yes, they could install Audacity for example but why would they want to, just to hear a file which I could as easily provided in a popular format?). Its acceptance is growing slowly, but it has been several years already and there are still few hardware players which support it. It's seen as a "geek format" still. Whether the recent MP3 fuss will change that is to be seen, my suspicion is that the tolerance for such broad patents is diminishing and it will get squashed. Chris C _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
