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

[Chris Croughton]

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