On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:25:39PM +0000, Neil Darlow wrote: > Chris Croughton wrote: > > 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. > > Perhaps simple economics. Why pay royalties to use MPEG when Ogg could > be used for free. As for incompatibility, how difficult would it be to > add playing of Theora/Vorbis formats wrapped in Ogg as opposed to > MPEG2/MP2 wrapped in MPEG1? Many players support a whole raft of formats > already e.g. CD/VCD/Photo-CD/DVD/DVD+- etc.
As far as the big players are concerned, the royalties would be peanuts. And I can see the RIAA and their ilk welcoming it because it would leave the little players (and independent producers) vunerable. > It's chicken-and-egg. Open formats won't be adopted until there's > support for them. I would certainly feel uneasy about selling a DVD, > authored in MPEG format, in the knowledge that I haven't paid the > royalties required to do so. Windows users may be immune to prosecution > but we aren't. Exactly. More power to the pigopolists, that's what they want. > I also don't believe that the threat posed by a patent is diminished > because people think "it's a bad thing and it will go away". Depends who the 'people' are. If it's a load of big hardware manufacturers who get annoyed, it's more likely that they'll challenge it in the courts. If it's thee and me, no one will care... Chris C _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
