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

[Jon Grant]

Hi!

Lots of good points Chris.

Chris Croughton elucidated on 01/03/07 16:05:
> 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).

You can download youTube clips using the VideoDownloader extension to
Firefox. Equally on 'doze Google Video will only provide content in a
format which needs their VLC build, but with Firefox on Linux they
provide it as an MPEG4 AVI.

All this doesn't help when the FSF is supporting Adobe's format by 
developing
their own flash plugin.


> 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").

I had similar problems, agencies don't even like PDF! The real reason they
want a Word file is because they need it to be editable, so they can
remove personal identification and contact details, replacing them with
the agency logo so the client has to employ you via the agency.


> 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.

I'd say our best approach would be to avoid the next MP3 or WMV, rather
than try and convince people to switch from established de facto
standards now. Get all the new media tech adopted as open standards and
shun/replace any proprietary standards pretty quickly to avoid them
becoming de facto too.

Cheers
Jon
--
Weblog: http://jguk.org/