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Sun, Philips Push MPEG-4 Up Steep Hill
Kellym writes: "Sun Microsystems and Philips Digital Networks are putting their chips on MPEG-4 in the battle to determine the streaming media standard of the future. The companies have agreed to expand their year-long relationship to promote and develop MPEG-4 technology for broadband and wireless markets. The companies have partnered on marketing and have agreed to share technologies. In the most recent deal, Philips licensed Sun's StorEdge Media Central server technology. Philips said it will include the technology in a WebCine Server MPEG-4 system it is developing to run on Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Sun Cobalt servers."
I have mpg1, mpeg2 and mpeg2.5(mp3) hardware in my house and car, I'm pretty sure mpeg4 will be there shortly.
People are trading VCD because they play on newer dvd drives. If they come out with a DVD player that plays some Mpg4 format, everyone will jump all over it. (IMHO)
I have a Dazzle and 2. I started encoding home movies on VCD and then migrated to SVCD for higher res. DVD-R is still a little pricey. If they come out with a Dazzle type of encoder with Mpeg4, I can keep using cheap CD's and make a "mini-dvd" type of disc. (Also DVD-Rs dont have burn proof yet, 10 dollar coasters, oh boy.)
I just hope that Sun & Co. will not try to go for their profits immediately. It'd be better to lower the prices, perhaps sponsor some Open-Source work, make it a popular thing among the consumer. Otherwise, it'll all be crushed by M$'s "we do it for free" strategy.
I want everyone and their mothers to support MPEG 4. As a web developer I am simply SICK of having to support 3 different media players and a bunch of different OSs. I want to be able to stream 1 format that can be played on every media player on every OS.
It's time we stopped tring to one up each other with new codecs and media players. We need to seriously PICK SOMETHING. This is the only way technology gets adopted by the masses.
I don't have to upgrade my CD player, DVD player, radio, or microwave every 6 months, why should I have to update my stupid computer's media players.
Consumers HATE adding plugins, codecs, and players...and I hate developing for 1 million different things.
MPEG4 is dynamic, auto-upgradable, and will make me a muuuuuch happier camper.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I remeber that philips came out with a cd version of the double cassette-deck (player and burner in one machine) shortly after they sold polygram. Whether that was a coincidence or not I do not know. I don't expect too many bad things from philips since they're not a media company anymore (unlike Sony)
I am sorry to be a wet blanket, but I don't see how streaming video has much of a future for mass acceptance. There is an architectual problem with this approach. True enough...broadband rollouts have made it possible to distribute video with relative ease, but the transmission requirements are just so great that it is really difficult to justify the bandwidth investment, especially on the server end. More than that, I don't see how any streaming media company can try to provide robustness of service.
My view is that there are some applications that are well suited for point-to-point communication mechanisms such as IP. If we were discussing the possibility of using this technology to enable video phone or other video conferencing applications, I would be a bit less pessimistic. But, we need to recognize the fact that some transmission modes are inherently broadcast: one source, many many listeners. We can talk about implementations of IP broadcast to save upstream bandwidth, etc, but the fundamental scaling problems are still there. Many networks need to carry identical copies of the same data.
Last Tuesday, we witnessed the fragile nature of current servers/onramps in dealing only with high levels of http traffic. How many of us got anything more than a server timeout from cnn.com last Tuesday? But it wasn't very hard to just punch 204 in the DirecTV remote and there it is. Streaming anything over IP has a long way to go to catch up with truly broadcast mechanisms.
If such streaming applications are going to be attempted, the entire process needs to be decentralized. Video-on-demand needs to stream from many servers at once to improve robustness. It needs to automatically replicate popular data to servers in different parts of the Internet, etc. The current work in P2P networks is focusing on just this type of scheme. Of course, doing so flies in the face of DMCA and the media wonks who want paid. Centralization provides control and a single point of failure. Decentralization provides robustness and loss of control.
I question whether or not streaming media will ever become the service that Sun, Sony, and MS are envisioning. The only way to make it work is by taking the P2P route and most of those approaches are "pirate" in nature. It may come to fruition with P2P swarmcast/distributed-caching schemes, but I doubt that using it will be legal.