Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
That's great - a 'somebody oughta' thread that actually produces action! Good job, guys! Now, somebody oughta dodge the patents for MP3, too Jameson ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: no, it does not need to be thrashed out either in the press or in court. The aim is to avoid both. What you need to do is produce detailed claim charts, along with a set of non-infringement arguments. Once you have those then you can work out how to write your code so as to avoid the patent. This isn't always possible, but it often is. I'm actually considering an approach like this, because the Gnash project is in the same basic boat as Samba when it comes to protocols and other things. Unless we research this, we'll never know... Not true at all. I have handled the patent avoidance for Samba for a long time now, and it has generally taken me a few weeks per patent with a good patent attorney to come up with a solid non-infringement argument. Those are intensive weeks, but it is certainly not years. I think it is work the effort, and would like to figure out how we on the Gnash team can do this. Whether the effort involved is worth it depends how much of an impediement these codec patents are to the success of the OLPC This issue is much more important to the Gnash project I think than the OLPC. While we do prefer emphasizing using free codecs, the simple fact is most of the content on the net is in a proprietary format, so we don't have much choice but to find ways to support them. Since often these web sites use flash to stream the video, it seems the problems lands on us Gnash developers to work out a solution... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Rob, I think it is work the effort, and would like to figure out how we on the Gnash team can do this. great! I'll contact you off list to discuss some of the ways we do this for Samba and see if I can give you some help getting started. Cheers, Tridge ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Ed, 1. There are two kinds of good patent attorneys. One kind works pro bono for free software and the other gets paid big bucks by patent holders. There is a 3rd kind - the kind that works for a law firm specifically funded to assist free software projects. For example, the Software Freedom Law Center. It's a question of two competing sides of a specific and very detailed technical and legal argument being thrashed out in the press and in the courts. no, it does not need to be thrashed out either in the press or in court. The aim is to avoid both. What you need to do is produce detailed claim charts, along with a set of non-infringement arguments. Once you have those then you can work out how to write your code so as to avoid the patent. This isn't always possible, but it often is. If you head to the Groklaw web site, you can see this sort of thing (from the free software side). This process does not take a few weeks but *decades*. Not true at all. I have handled the patent avoidance for Samba for a long time now, and it has generally taken me a few weeks per patent with a good patent attorney to come up with a solid non-infringement argument. Those are intensive weeks, but it is certainly not years. If it took 'decades' then what you would be doing is waiting for the patent to expire. Whether the effort involved is worth it depends how much of an impediement these codec patents are to the success of the OLPC project. In the case of Samba we can't just choose to use another protocol, so avoiding patents via non-infringement is our only choice. If we can't do it then we have to shutdown the project. That makes almost any level of effort worthwhile. For OLPC the need for these codecs is almost certainly not as critical, so perhaps the effort is not worthwhile. That is not really for me to judge. I just wanted to point out that the existance of a patent in connection with a codec is not necessarily a show stopper. Cheers, Tridge ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
I have been following prior discussions about codecs in general (it is not about Gnash) and there is one thing I cannot understand. As I see for example a H.264 AVC codec license is 0 or 10 or 20 cents/device. If I am mistaken somebody please correct me. See: http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf Sure, using Ogg over MP3 is totally okay, since it is not only free but better than MP3. But as others said all the free video codecs are crap compared to commercial ones. So my question: is there any reason that the OLPC cannot license one good quality codec for ~10 cents? (Not sure that it should be H.264 but anything else which runs with adequate speed on the XO, and has VideoLAN support.) Walter Bender wrote: Ben is right on target. Rather than going off shore to support proprietary codecs, we should be advocating the use of FOSS codecs. -walter On Jan 8, 2008 10:06 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: There might be some way to embed Theora in Flash in a way that Gnash can play, but this will never work in Adobe Flash. I strongly advise that, for OLPC, you avoid Flash altogether. Gnash can already handle both Ogg and Theora as external files just fine. We're also modifying Ming to be able to generate swf files with Ogg and Theora as embedded data. This requires extending the swf spec in a way that still says compatible for FLV, ON2, and MP3. To go along with this, I've been working on a clone of the Adobe Media Server, so we can steam free codecs. Right now you can only do this with icecast, but it doesn't speak the flash protocols, which Gnash now supports. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org mailto:Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 19:34 -0700, Rob Savoye wrote: Sigh, I am getting so tired of this issue with codecs... Gnash for the XO is built without support for any proprietary audio or video codecs. Because of the patent laws, the OLPC project (which is based in the US) cannot redistribute these codecs. So, although Gnash supports dailymotion just fine, it'll never work on the XO unless it's built with support for these codecs, namely FLV, ON2, and MP3. Does Gnash not use gstreamer and hence work with the extra codec plugins which are already available in livna? Having to _build_ it with the problematic support would seem to be a poor design decision. -- dwmw2 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 20:06 -0700, Rob Savoye wrote: To go along with this, I've been working on a clone of the Adobe Media Server, so we can steam free codecs. Right now you can only do this with icecast, but it doesn't speak the flash protocols, which Gnash now supports. Oooh. Gnash now supports RTMP? -- dwmw2 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The other option is to write implementations of the codecs that avoid the patents. Whether that is possible depends on the exact wording of the patent, and sometimes it takes a few weeks working with a good patent attorney to work out exactly what the patent really says. Sometimes it just isn't possible. We really need a open project to do patent analysis of this kind and determine which of these key patents (not just codecs, but also other important blocking patents) can be avoided, and which ones are too tied to the format to avoid. Perhaps the OLPC project would provide a good bit of motivation for people to do this type of work? 1. There are two kinds of good patent attorneys. One kind works pro bono for free software and the other gets paid big bucks by patent holders. It's not just a question of quality or attorney or length of time spent. It's a question of two competing sides of a specific and very detailed technical and legal argument being thrashed out in the press and in the courts. If you head to the Groklaw web site, you can see this sort of thing (from the free software side). This process does not take a few weeks but *decades*. 2. I personally don't think the OLPC project has the bandwidth or the energy to get involved in such a struggle. As the recent events between OLPC and Intel have showed, when you wrestle with a pig, both of you get mud all over but only the pig enjoys it. :) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Hi all, Thanks a lot for your help and comments. However it seems quite difficult for us to encode our videos in Theora+Vorbis right now. I'm gonna talk to different people in the company to get their opinion and see what we can do. In the meantime, I've heard of the Helix Media Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(project) for the OLPC project? It won't be of any help? Thanks again Sebastien Adgnot On Jan 9, 2008 5:25 PM, Bill Nottingham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jake Beard ([EMAIL PROTECTED] ) said: Hopefully, later this year we'll see a completely open Java, and then see Java on the XO. Flash is terrible. If it were possible, I'd prefer to see an all-Java solution. That being said, in my experience both with closed and open Java implementations, I wouldn't expect a huge speed improvement on the OLPC from switching from Flash to Java. Bill ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Thanks for offering help. However, I was thinking more about ressources (time, people, storage, encoding, priorities, etc.). Anyway, I'm going to report what everybody wrote and see if we can make it soon ... or later. Thanks Sebastien On Jan 9, 2008 10:32 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 22:19 +0100, Sebastien Adgnot wrote: Hi all, Thanks a lot for your help and comments. However it seems quite difficult for us to encode our videos in Theora+Vorbis right now. I'm gonna talk to different people in the company to get their opinion and see what we can do. If your difficulty is technical, then there are dozens of multimedia and web software experts here who would love to step in and help you (at no charge). In the meantime, I've heard of the Helix Media Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(project) for the OLPC project? It won't be of any help? The Helix Player is no longer included in the OLPC distribution, though it is available as an optional download. Helix Player only provides Theora video. The user can manually download additional binary-only codecs, but this is not supported by OLPC. This is no easier than having users manually install Adobe's binary Flash plugin, which OLPC also cannot distribute. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Jake Beard wrote: Hopefully, later this year we'll see a completely open Java, and then see Java on the XO. Flash is terrible. If it were possible, I'd prefer to see an all-Java solution. Sorry, but java sucks rocks, and although I dislike flash, I think it's a better solution for just streaming video. The several years I worked with Java was a nightmare of bloated code and poor performance. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We really need a open project to do patent analysis of this kind and determine which of these key patents (not just codecs, but also other important blocking patents) can be avoided, and which ones are too tied to the format to avoid. Perhaps the OLPC project would provide a good bit of motivation for people to do this type of work? As of last week, I've incorporated the Open Media Now! foundation to work on issues like this. Our current projects are Gnash and Cygnal (Cygnal being our media server). We hope to expand this as I raise funding to work on the political and legal aspects. Yes, good lawyers are expensive... I do believe that figuring out a clean and legal path through this minefield is very important for free software. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Sebastien Adgnot wrote: However it seems quite difficult for us to encode our videos in Theora+Vorbis right now. I'm gonna talk to different people in the company to get their opinion and see what we can do. Ffm peg does a fair job at codec conversion. We use our friends at Lulu.tv to convert videos to free formats. In the meantime, I've heard of the Helix Media Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(project) for the OLPC project? It won't be of any help? No. It's not really useful, and the streaming codecs are not included, you still have to license the codecs anyway. The free version of helix is one of those brain damaged things that's purposely limited. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
-- Forwarded message -- From: Sebastien Adgnot [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Jan 8, 2008 4:27 PM Subject: Dailymotion for XO laptop To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi, My name is Sebastien and I'm a web developer at Dailymotion, a major European video sharing web site. I had the chance a couple of weeks ago to discover the XO laptop and to play with it. I was impressed with what the machine can do, and what the project represents. Unfortunately, when I tried to see Dailymotion's website http://www.dailymotion.com, the videos didn't work. We would like to solve this problem. At first we want to make a version of our web site compatible with the XO laptop. But we might be more interested later in being involved in the OLPC project through, for example, a dedicated activity, helping the community to share and spread videos for different purposes (educational, creative, etc.). However to achieve the first step, I wanted to know: what is the best way for us to display the videos in the browser with no extra configuration for the user? I read this page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Video and this one too http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_Software#Include_Flash_Player.3F http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_Software#Include_Flash_Player.3F but I want to be sure to be optimized with all the parameters of the laptop (video performance, cpu, power management, etc.). We encode our videos in flv, mp4, 3gp, etc. Also, to test if the videos are displayed the right way, it would be great if we could have a laptop. Is it still possible, in our case, to get one through the G1G1 program, exceptionally? Ortherwise, what would be another way? I tried the VMWare image of the OS but I'm not sure that it's a good way to test the real performance when we watch a video on the laptop. Thank you for your help Sebastien Adgnot PS: here is my contact information: 1. Sébastien Adgnot 2. [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 3. Dailymotion 4. Shipping address * Dailymotion * 51 rue Ganneron * Paris * 75017 * France * phone number: + 33 1 77 35 11 11 5. maybe a French power adapter if possible but not mandatory. Qwerty keyboard is fine. 6. 1 laptop 7. We want to test and improve the quality of the videos for the laptop and its specifications 8. We have within the company all the skills for the software development (python, web programming, video encoding) -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Walter Bender wrote: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_Software#Include_Flash_Player.3F but I want to be sure to be optimized with all the parameters of the laptop (video performance, cpu, power management, etc.). We encode our videos in flv, mp4, 3gp, etc. For the usual patent reasons, OLPC only ships with Ogg Theora video support and Ogg Vorbis audio support*. If you make your videos available as plain Theora+Vorbis, they will be immediately viewable in the XO's browser. You will also instantly become the preferred video site for OLPC content, since YouTube, Google Video, and even olpc.tv rely on FLV, which OLPC cannot support. I would jump for joy. There might be some way to embed Theora in Flash in a way that Gnash can play, but this will never work in Adobe Flash. I strongly advise that, for OLPC, you avoid Flash altogether. - --Ben *: OLPC also supports the other Ogg audio codecs, FLAC and speex, as well as various basic PCM-type codecs. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHhDagUJT6e6HFtqQRAnDJAJ0cYGkaEfMJiHijnTm8MEyKerQrWwCfVNrh LoM4URqVwtCyl76tclgYpcA= =R9ff -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: There might be some way to embed Theora in Flash in a way that Gnash can play, but this will never work in Adobe Flash. I strongly advise that, for OLPC, you avoid Flash altogether. Gnash can already handle both Ogg and Theora as external files just fine. We're also modifying Ming to be able to generate swf files with Ogg and Theora as embedded data. This requires extending the swf spec in a way that still says compatible for FLV, ON2, and MP3. To go along with this, I've been working on a clone of the Adobe Media Server, so we can steam free codecs. Right now you can only do this with icecast, but it doesn't speak the flash protocols, which Gnash now supports. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Walter Bender wrote: Unfortunately, when I tried to see Dailymotion's website http://www.dailymotion.com, the videos didn't work. Sigh, I am getting so tired of this issue with codecs... Gnash for the XO is built without support for any proprietary audio or video codecs. Because of the patent laws, the OLPC project (which is based in the US) cannot redistribute these codecs. So, although Gnash supports dailymotion just fine, it'll never work on the XO unless it's built with support for these codecs, namely FLV, ON2, and MP3. I'm on vacation this week, but I'm very strongly considering finding a safe host far away where I can stick a Gnash build for the XO that fully works, as that's probably the easiest fix. I sure wish Gnash could be distributed to support these codecs, but changing US patent laws seems a huge project. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
