[ale] video software programming jobs (MPEG? H.264?)

aaron aaron at pd.org
Sat Jan 10 03:12:19 EST 2009


On 2009, Jan, 09, , at 12:18 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On 01/09/2009 11:37 AM, aaron wrote:
>> Given the W3C announcement of making Ogg Theora THE (actual & open)
>> standard for compressed Audio / Video media delivery on the internet,
>
> Can you provide a link to this announcement?  it sounds like really  
> good
> news, but i was under the impression that they backed away from
> strongly/uniquely endorsing ogg under pressure from the proprietary
> format groups.  I'd be really happy to be wrong about that.

Looking into the current status (and reading between the lines of
the Wikipedia entries) OGG Vorbis / Theora appear to be surviving
as part of the HTML5 recommendation, but there is some very vocal
resistance coming from the likes of Nokia and Apple, primarily
because the adoption might interfere with their implementations of
freedom killing Destructive Restriction Mechanisms and end their
potential for monopoly control of any dominant proprietary formats.

Like any propaganda spewing from the global corporatist greed machine,
the foundational arguments of Apple and Nokia are largely Fraud and FUD.
The main Fraud part is where they fly in the face of reason to argue
that the public compression formats are proprietary even though Xiph.org
does not hold any patent claims on their publicly published, Open Source
specifications and has no way to control or influence their  
implementation.
The terrorist FEAR part of the FUD is connected to this by suggesting  
that
there might be secret, "undiscovered", boogeyman patents hiding in the
closet that could jump out and grab the technology, even though such a
monster could be imagined for any sophisticated encoding algorithm that
must venture into the insane, lightless world of software patents. They
fabricate further doubt in misrepresenting the low levels of Ogg /  
Theora
adoption (in an arena controlled entirely by commercial cronyism) as an
implied indictment of the free technology's functionality -- all of  
which
is a total denial of the more honest market share comparisons for PNG
format images before and after they were adopted as an Open, public
standard for web graphics.

>> Ogg Theora are GPL Open Source solutions
>
> According to /usr/share/doc/libtheora0/copyright on this debian lenny
> system i'm on, theora appears to use a BSD-style license, not GPL.   
> This
> means that folks who want to build proprietary media delivery systems
> can use it just as easily as folks who want to build free media  
> delivery
> systems.

Thanks for the correction; it is a BSD style license.  But this just
further exposes the fraud of the arguments against adoption being pushed
by the corporate entities. Particularly (and sickly) ironic since Apple
would be DEAD now if it weren't for their exploitation of commercial
access to Free BSD.

>> why would anyone
>> pursue proprietary MPEG/H.264 schemes for a media delivery system?
>
> This is a very good question.

Yes it is. Even knowing that the final public W3C HTML5 recommendations
will remain malleable for some time, the inclusion of direct Ogg /  
Theora
support in the popular Open Source web client tools from Mozilla.org  
will
go a long way toward making those Open, public standards THE standards
for internet media delivery.  The most successful and resilient  
"markets"
are always those whose paths of delivery and access are protected from
the excesses of greed by being public, free, equitable and open.

Since the final W3C recommendations are an open issue, I think it quite
valid to promote the Ogg Vorbis / Theora web media standards as  
inevitable.
In the face of all the corporate FUD mongering, it might give them a  
fair
chance of becoming the public standards that we so desperately need.

peace
aaron


OT/PS:
Then again, it's difficult to be optimistic about this kind of stuff
when I'm in the middle of reading "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein.
I figure it won't be too long now until the corporatists stage a large
scale internet disaster and use the aftermath shock wave of mob terror
to destroy the egalitarian freedom and democracy we all enjoy here, all
with the same tactics they've been using to usurp the commonwealth
and democracy of cities, states and nations for nearly four decades.




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