RealNetworks Licenses MS Windows Media Codec

fReNeTiK writes, "RealNetworks have announced their licensing of the Microsoft Windows Media streaming format. That brings the number of codecs supported by RealPlayer to 9. CNet story here, Heise News (German) here. This, of course raises an important question: Realplayer being available under Linux, will the next version include the new codec, bringing WMF streaming to Linux and Unix in general?" Based on how slowly RealPlayer has ported their clients to Linux and Unix in the past, it may be a while until we find out. I would personally prefer an open source media player if the codec patent issues can be handled, but sometimes (sigh) you just have to make do with hand-me-downs because they're all you're going to get for a while.

Comments

But will it be licensed for Linux?

[acb]

The question is will the codec be ported to Linux? Windows Media is touted as a copyright-enforcement technology as well as a format. Many proprietors of copyright-enforcing closed formats refuse to release software decoders for platforms with open-source kernels, as it is possible to modify the kernel to capture audio to a file (in a way that the player cannot reasonably defend against). For example, Liquid Audio does not support Linux, and neither do any software DVD decoders (well, any aboveground ones). If MS allows a Linux port of its technology, it could face content companies withdrawing licenses to release their content in its format, in favour of more restricted players. Remember, these companies are paranoid and scared, and not exactly the most trusting of the Net. (I believe Universal, for one, has its own format under development, and Sony is doing something with ATRAC and its own copyright-enforcement mechanisms; and that alone is almost half the music market.)

You can do that already on Windows

[Ian Schmidt]

Look at for instance http://www.maz-sound.com/ - there are fake Windows audio drivers available that capture to .WAV files.

Re:What about free codecs?

[SIGBUS]

There is a free codec being worked on - Ogg Vorbis, headed by Monty of cdparanoia fame. Currently it is not even alpha-test, but it is possible to encode audio with it. There's also a plugin for xmms, still a little buggy, but that'll be taken care of. You can also play Vorbis files with the example decoder, piped through sox, if your copy of sox has the 'ossdsp' code compiled in.

The Ogg project is as much about research as it is about coding - it looks like they're combing through existing signal processing research to come up with something that's patent-free.

With the ultra-bare-bones example encoder, I've encoded some songs - it sounds quite nice, at least as good as MP3, maybe a little better to my ears. Currently it only seems to do VBR streams, but I assume that will change in the future - the goal is to allow specifying fixed or variable rates, with floors and ceilings for VBR.

It'll be interesting to see if they make a video codec...

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only AUDIO format!

[Domino]

If I read the articles correctly, this is only
the streaming AUDIO format (WMA), not MS's streaming video format.

Quote from CNet article:

Microsoft said today that RealNetworks and several other major Internet companies, including Yahoo, have agreed to license its Windows Media audio format.

They never mention the video format.

Open source

[riggwelter]

I suspect it could be quite some time before we see an open source player for Windows Media Format, if one appears at all. The CNet story doesn't say so, but I think we can assume that Real (and the other 70 companies) have paid Microsoft, and probably quite handsomly, for the license.

Even if one of the major distributions, Red Hat, SuSE, etc were to license it, you can bet the terms of the license would not permit the opening of the codec. What we could possibly see would be an open source player using plugins for various codecs (this would make it very expandable without the need to recompile a new version for new codecs of course) where the WMF plugin had to be closed source.

Course it could still be free for download and all that malarky, which is definately better than nothing.

WMF seems to unfortunately becoming a very popular standard amongst streaming media services, this does rather seem to strengthen Microsoft's grip (not monopolistic yet, but you know that's where they're planning to head) on the streaming media area. The more players support WMF, the more suppliers will serve their streams as WMF, and M$ control the standard.

Of course, WMF pales in comparison to MPEG2 (and newer versions). As broadband in the home becomes more of a reality, and the hardware to provide decent decoding for MPEG more accesible (most new video cards include hardware decoding, and even if they don't, something like the Creative Dxr* cards are not very expensive) the relatively open standard of MPEG could make a good showing, especially in the open source arena.

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Re:What about free codecs?

[Tet]

What about free codecs?

By free, I assume you mean open. The problem with open codecs is (at least in the eyes of content providers) copy protection. They see an inability to save streamed RealAudio/ReadVideo, and are happy because their copyrighted works aren't being distributed around the net. An open codec would allow anyone to save the streamed data to a file for later use. In actual fact, the current closed codecs only provide security through obscurity anyway, and will eventually be compromised.

Microsoft knows what it is doing..

[elemur]

..and people are missing the point by looking at the smaller picture. Microsoft is trying to establish itself as a better player in the enterprise and servers markets, and to do this they must deploy more server farms.. especially under W2K.

By allowing Real to support the Windows Media formatt, they are opening up a wider base of clients to use their formats.. and therefore a wider base of clients to use their Windows Media Stream servers. These stream servers are only available for Windows.. and it wouldn't be a big shock for future versions to target W2K as its preferred platform.

This push helps to establish MS in data centers and server farms where it may not have had a presence.. and to expand the presence where it was previously located. They don't care a thing about RealPlayer and MediaPlayer per se.. if you can own the servers, you get a big boost in owning the clients as well.

What about free codecs?

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Every time we get on a movie or music topic people whine about "when will X port Y" and "how come software Z keeps crashing in Linux but not on Windows", etc.

The slightly more clueful say "we need free software that can handle these codecs, that'll solve ALL our problems".

That solves nothing: What about free codecs? Is there anyone working on this? The advantage would be not only freedom, but then we'd also have a standard (or more likely, several standards). If I was halfway qualified I'd work on this myself, unfortunately this post represents the edges of my knowledge.
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ZDNet link

[fReNeTiK]

Just noticed that ZDNet has a story on it too... here .

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but the first paragraph is intriguing:

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) proclaimed on Tuesday that long-time rival RealNetworks Inc. (Nasdaq: RNWK) -- plus a handful of other vendors, including Yahoo!, Sonic Foundry, AOL Winamp and Lycos Sonique -- had agreed to license Microsoft's Windows Media format technology.

So it's not just about RealNetworks. This looks like a big victory for this format, and MS.

Does anybody know if WMF has SDMI support? I think it is, or at least there are a couple of copyright enforcement mechanisms in there. I have the vague feeling that the RIAA must be very pleased by this...