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Open Source Video Streaming Needed
Mike McCune writes "This article discusses how streaming video is controlled by three companies: Real, Microsoft and Apple. It discusses how open sourced video streaming software is needed. I looked around and found the start of some OS streaming software. There is a video streamer based on Darwin here and there is the start of several players here." But what about the codec patent problems? I have been told that they're the big holdup. [sigh]
There's a link on the vic page to IVS, another very similar also-opensource tool.
I haven't used either of these tools myself because I can't afford the hardware, but I have a feeling that the Linux/Wintel crowd is ignoring a lot of research that has already taken place. Research people are often uninterested or incompetent in packaging and marketing their tools, but they may well have already done the hard part for you. And it looks to me like Apple and Microsoft stole most of their ideas from these guys.
ASF's are semi-open, at least MS publishes specs
The CODEC's are protected like crazy tho.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
icecast (see http://www.icecast.org) is a program for the streaming of mp3 audio. But changes have been made to the program at various points in its development to allow it to also stream MPEG video across the 'net. Another hack was done at one point so that it would stream meta-refreshing jpegs.
:)
Now for the obvious question -- if it can be modified to support this, why doesn't it support it out of the box? Relatively simple to answer. At present, streaming MPEG video takes up a shitload of bandwidth. I seem to remember that the internal network of the developers was strained when they streamed the video. So, some sort of better compression of video is needed. Secondly, multicast would be really useful. It's a feature on the near-future TODO list, but will involve lots of rewriting as well as updating clients to support (for just the audio; clients don't even exist really for streaming mpeg video
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Jeremy Katz
There's a good article on http://www.dv.com/magazine/2000/0100/johnson0100.h tml on why you might not want to jump on the streaming bandwagon. Streaming was originally developed so you wouldn't have to wait for the entire movie to download. What happened was that people didn't like constant interruptions from network conjestion so the purpose of streaming video became copyright protection. When you see those stream-only websites, the reason they do that is to prevent you from copying it and uploading it to your website. On the other hand, Linux has pretty good low-bitrate downloadable solutions. MPEG-2 with sound can go as low as 200kbit/sec. VALinux, which does all its multimedia on Win NT incidentally, hosts 300kbit streams.
But even if it were, standards bodies should insist that methods that are adopted into standards are available royalty free to anybody, or at the very least royalty free for open source implementations.
In fact, they often do, and many standards have and will have free implementations as a consequence (JBIG and JPEG2000 being two of them). I suspect that with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, it's the influence of the greed and money of the media industry and Hollywood that causes them to be governed by "patent pools". At the very least, corporate lawyers look at the money those companies are making and wondering: how can we get a slice of that.
I have no problem with taking a cut from big media companies. The problem I have is that we still need a free format for free content, for socially important content, etc., something that allows people who don't have a lot of money to get their content across the Internet, using a free infrastructure.
While proprietary streaming video technology is a lot cheaper than a television station, it can nevertheless exclude a lot of voices from participating in the media. How?
First, proprietary technology, adopted as a standard and protected by patents, still ends up being a lot more expensive than equivalent free technology, and the price alone keeps people from using it.
Think not only of the cost of the encoder or a small streaming server, but of the cost of putting up a large streaming server that can reach a lot of people. Companies developing the streaming technology are going to charge for the use of their proprietary server technology based on commercial uses; maybe that ends up being only a fractional cent per connection, but that quickly adds up and becomes out of reach for non-commercial content providers.
A second problem is that the technology will likely be licensed selectively when it comes to large service providers. The heavy duty streaming video servers may end up only being available from a few large hosting companies, and those may have restrictions on content similar to those of large television companies. That hasn't happened yet, but it is another way in which proprietary distribution technology can limit available content. And the analogy to the broadcast networks and their bland, low-quality content is quite close--in the case of the broadcast networks, it wasn't patents but broadcast licenses that were exclusionary and led to the dumbing down of America.
And lastly, proprietary technology is self-perpetuating. If you leave the development of standards and technology to a few companies, they are going to develop and patent all the "innovations" and perpetuate their hold on the market. Many of those "innovations" may only be simple tweaks, ideas that would easily and naturally occur to any open source developer, but they will nevertheless be protected for decades to come. By playing the patent game right, companies can keep content in proprietary formats in perpetuity.
instead of an entirely new codec why not just use a version of MPEG-2 compression? MPEG-2 does not mean CSS, just in case anyone is flame happy for whatever reason. MPEG-2 is designed to be streamed, it's what DTV among other things are going to use. The bonuses of MPEG-2 is that a good number of newer video cards have hardware decompression and a good deal of those cards have X servers already written for them so a good deal of their specs are already known. MPEG-1 and 2 are also open formats and any Joe Programmer can makes an app using the codec. The hardware acceleration is a big bonus but even without it a smaller video frame wouldn't be too difficult for your CPU to decode. One of the best advantages of MPEG-2 is the good compression ratio, even lowbanders on 28.8s and 14.8s could get a decent quality picture and sound.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
QT streaming server can serve any codec -- it doesn't really care what it is. Likewise, the quicktime player will play multiple codecs, including MP3 and mpeg2.
Also, does anyone actually stream mpeg2? This is a serious question. I haven't seen it, but of course I don't have much time to look for content at the only place I have access to enough bandwidth to make streaming video worthwhile.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Unfortunately, most (all) of the good video compression algorithms are patented and cannot be used. Even if some may not like it, Microsoft's ASF (players and encoders, surprise, are both free; looks like someone has a lot of resources) is very good, it uses MPEG-4, suitable for low bitrate video. From my personal experience, the competitors don't come close.
The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.
Even if there would be a product, standardization is another large obstacle. Take image file formats: There are products superior to JPEG (like DJVU or LWF), but no website creator uses them, many people wouldn't know how to install the plug-ins (which are available for free). I guess even JPEG2000 will have a hard time once it's out. The success will depend on decoders being built into standard browsers by default. And they should work flawlessly (remember PNG)!
The article is correct in it's concern that only an OSS broadcasting solution can creat the future we all want.. where anyone can broadcast there video over the internet.. and patents are our obstical. The solution appears to be ``compramize our principals in the short term, but not in the long term.'' I will explain..
A legislation solution (I think this is RMS's proposed solution) seems unlikely.. especially for Algorithms that really do require an understanding of a good bit of math to create.
Many mathematicians are getting kinda sick of inventing some cool new thing to help sociaty only to see some company steal it's applications by putting one word like computer, audio, or video in front of it.. and many researchers could probable be talked into giving the open source community a list of possible applications when they invent something new.. so we could patent it first and use a viral patent license. Unfortunatly, this is considered too expencive by people in the know (like RMS). I personally feal this is workable if the patenting orginisation were less principaled then the FSF could pull something off by doing the following:
1) Use an extreamly viral license the prohibits mixed use of the patent with any patents not distributed under the same license, i.e. no company can use our patents unless the cross licence with the rest of the world via our license.
2) Allow companies to get arround 1 by paying thorugh the nose and use the money to reward the researchers and pay for lawyers, i.e. compramize our principals occasionally.
Unfortunatly, the above dose require a lot of orginisation, a lot of conenctions, and a lot of work.
The best solution is probable: control the viewer and server. If a codec maker dose not want to go OSS then we should make it hard for them to get users.. up to the point that they are really a hell of a lot better then anyhting we are using.. at which point we should compramize a little.
It is also worth mentioning that codec makers make money by licensing the authoring software (i think) or with crap attached to the codec, so there should probable be a push to implement OSS versions of the authoring software and codecs in countries where the patent dose not apply.. then make the OSS version the default, i.e. default RedHat xanim has no support for the codec so the user is forced to choose between downloading a single OSS xanim which is illegal or downloading a million codecs. This will cut into there proffit margin.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The real problem are the video codecs. Most of them are not even owned by the respective companies (e.g. most of the high-compression, high-quality codecs that Apple/MS use are licensed from other companies - Sorenson, Cinepak, Indeo). Note that for some of these it is possible to create freely-distributable binaries (a la Xanim) but it is highly unlikely that these companies will release the algorithms or source code any time in the near future.
What would probably be the best bet is to scour the academic literature on video compression and/or bug people in the field for info and create an alternative codec that is freely distributable. You could then produce a plugin for QuickTime, VFW, etc. to encourage the general adoption of the codec. If a content-based company can run a server and deliver content without technology licensing fees, I'm sure they'd be interested.
There are three things a video codec requires:
- spatial transform, eg idct, which I think is patented. There are many wavelet types, some of which may not be spatial transformed are used to find the most significant information; the rest is chopped.
- Coding scheme: huffman is unpatented, syntax-arith encoding is (but when does it expire?) Both require that lots of analysis be done on symbol frequency. This is tedious, not difficult.
- motion compensatio: in oreder to make use of duplication between frames - again, not hard.
. The open source community should not write off the idea of doing its own video codec. The most difficult part is the transform; if a decent unpatented one can be found, the rest is within the capabilities of many coders. Video codecs are EASIER to write than audio codecs, as the proportion of information that the eye actually percieves is lower. In order to do decent compression in audio, very complex models of the ear are required; this is not true of video. Oh, and the eyes colour resolution is lower than its luminance resolutionLots of companies with large amounts of money invested in overly complicated streaming systems will complain, but there's a real bottom line:
The standard video format is MPG, because MPG Just Works. Everywhere.
AVI has failed. The general perception of an AVI file is one that might play, might not, might suddenly install a new codec, might not, who knows. No predictability.
MOV? All the pain of an AVI, with free delays while you deny Apple their cut. From the guys who killed Firewire...
RM. Realmedia ain't bad, but it just doesn't scale up too well. There's this common delusion that only people with broadband links should be able to view high quality video--in this paradigm, RealMedia can do OK, since relatively few people have consistently extreme high bandwidth links to the Net. But, ya know what? This paradigm leaves millions of people unable to view high quality video, except on television.
Presume people can download clips and watch them later, and suddenly the stream-biased, bandwidth-capped format that is RealMedia suddenly looks stale and chunky.
The bottom line, beyond quality issues, is that MPG has won for the same reason MP3 did: It Works. All the various copyright protection systems are obsessed with creating situations where the consumer tries to do something and It Doesn't Work. As I'm sure the consumer trials are showing, when Things Don't Work, consumers simply refuse to buy in. And that's the key--the investors may fund, the studios may create, but it's the consumer that pays for it all.
MPG may not be a low bandwidth streaming format, by any means, but the general obsession of streaming--and streaming only--is short sighted at best, and suicidal at worst. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months.
See y'all at the DVD trial...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Quicktime streaming source
Can't help ya with on the client side. Maybe Apple doesn't know you want it.
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