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

[Chris Croughton]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:14:58PM +0000, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

> On Thursday 01 March 2007 12:00, Chris Croughton wrote:
> > 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 
> 
> Er - tell them about it, and send them the files as oggs with a link to the 
> Zinf player (www.zinf.org)?

In the main, they won't bother, just as I ignore links which require me
to install Flash (and all of YouTube which requires that I ibnstall some
Google player).

> If free software people don't put themselves out 
> a bit for free formats, then why should others?  My kids think I am slightly 
> deranged to keep all our CDs in oggs rather than the mp3s their friends use, 
> but at least they know a bit about the rationale, and if they need them on a 
> phone they can transcode them to lower the quality/size.

It depends whether they want it and how much.  Preseumably in the case
of your kids all of the software is already installed, and there is an
easily accessible expert (you) to ask how to do it.  In the case of
someone who I want to listen to a file it's up to me to provide it in a
usable format for the listener.  For several I use the completely open
CD format, everyone can play that.

The same applies to OpenOffice.org.  There is no point in me sending out
my CV as an OO.o file, because they will just bin it.  Doesn't matter
how many links I send them to get OO.o, it isn't worth their time and
effort and they will just class me as a fanatical geek (I used to send
them out as pure ACSII, but I even had complaints about that and
comments of "If you don't send it as a Word file we won't look at it").

> > Its
> > acceptance is growing slowly, but it has been several years already and
> > there are still few hardware players which support it.
> 
> Likewise for hardware - Samsung, Cowon (iAudio), iRiver (to give just the big 
> names) all make players for oggs - my son got a Samsung at Christmas.  It's 
> just a matter of looking for them.  

As I said, it is only just becoming acceptable in the mainstream.  And
that's with it being easy to implement and in an area where most content
was "user-provided" until recently.  With video the vast majority of
that distributed in DVD form is commercially produced, and the rest is
pirated so they don't care about patents anyway, so there is less reason
to support a new format.

Chris C