Re: [Fsfe-uk] Open Standards-based DVD Authoring

[Neil Darlow]

Hi Chris,

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.

> 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.


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.

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".

Regards,
Neil Darlow