begin quoting Chris Seberino as of Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 01:31:00PM -0800: > On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 12:40 -0800, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > begin quoting Chris Seberino as of Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 12:10:12PM -0800: > > > It is very odd that *video* is not more widely used like > > > text and sounds are over the Internet. > > > > Bandwidth isn't infinite. > > Doesn't BitTorrent (a Python app!) save all?
That doesn't make bandwidth infinite, no matter what glittery language it's written in. Video is bandwidth-hungry, even when compressed. > > > There is no ubiquitous easy format for video the same way > > > that text has ASCII/HTML and sound has MP3/Ogg. > > > > Sure there is. It's called MPEG. > > Then how come everyone doesn't use MPEG? How come everyone doesn't use vim? Or TCL? Or ksh? > For example, > I wanted to watch a 20 min tutorial video of a great Python web > framework at turbogears.com. They did it in QuickTime!?!? > Why would an open source project do a QuickTime video if MPEG > is so great? Because Apple makes GOOD tools. And Quicktime is just a wrapper. The Quicktime application plays MPEGs just fine. > How popular would the web be today if instead of HTML the world > had 4 or 5 competing incompatible markup languages in 1993? Why do you assume that there weren't? It was the free pictures of nekkid wimmin that kicked off the 'Net, not any mythical superiority of HTML over other markup languages. In fact, the hypertext weenies I knew in the '90s *despised* HTML as a _lousy_ markup language. > I'm guessing video usage and innovation would explode when > people rallied around 1 format for video like MPEG. The problem with wishing to rally around one format is that there are a lot of pressures to make sure that format isn't open; M$ is pushing, hard, to make .WMV "the" video format. And they have resources. Never, ever, wish for _only one_ format; your wish may be granted, but with the classical twist that leaves you worse off than the one before. > Perhaps it really all just boils down to bandwidth. Maybe we all just > have to wait for broadband and BitTorrent to penetrate 90 of US > households. It's the size of the pipes that matters. Offer up free full-length pr0n movies in MPEG, if you want to guide the market. BitTorrent isn't the solution to the bandwidth problem -- it's a distribution and bottleneck solution, which is only slightly related. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
