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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."
hmmm, I wonder what Sony has in store for MPEG-4. Since they are smiling tyrannical MPAA mafia dons, I would think they would attempt to counter it with something propitiatory so they could encode it all to shit.
For that reason alone I am glad to see Philips standing behind MPEG-4 since they are perhaps the only consumer electronics company that can force a standard through market share.
Based on MPEG-4 with Quicktime support enhancements. The bomb if you've ever seen it. Twice the compresion of the sorenson2 codec. Very small file size with great picture quality.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I can't help but wonder where this leaves me. Some (few ?) of us are still using dialup 56K (or lower) connections. All this wonderful new content is great, but remember it takes some of use a bit longer to download stuff. Yep, you could say "Get with the times" and "Get Cable or ASDL or something" but it's not exactly affordable in some places... sigh
Then watch us build your 'high-speed distributed video serving network' in our spare time at no cost to you, while MS, Apple, Real and AOL fuck around for years trying to court 'industry players' and 'content copyright holders'.
If the whole 'Napster' thing proved anything it's that there are a shitload of people out there desparate for content they don't get supplied through 'mainstream media', but nobody wants to pay the same people who have been screwing them down at the record store for years.
The Linux community is crying out for decent video tools, and none of the other players except maybe Real seem particularly interested in providing them.
To beat M$ in this area, Sun and Philips are going to need some serious help, and the only place they're likely to find it these days is with the Open-Source/Free Software community.
We have more clout with M$ than the US Justice department does, anyway.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Many people don't really understand what DivX is. There's the DivX
I've been looking into streaming MPEG 4 video off a Linux server and it's still rather immature. FFMpeg looks like it might be getting there, but I quote from the FAQ: "New developments broke ffserver, so don't expect it to work correctly. It is planned to fix it ASAP."
It would be nice to find a good OpenSource (pref. Linux) solution for streaming MPEG 4 content (from a Video4Linux BTTV device). Does anyone know of one?
See for example: http://www.e-vue.com/about/may072001.cfm
One of the ways in which the MP4 standard is quite dumb is that the "security" features are an optional extra. You don't have to have lots of ornate key management policies and encrpytion schemes in order to enjoy the benefits of increased compression/versatility/whatever.
But (as we all know, I guess) that'll never work the way they think it should. This is simply because so long as there is an "insecure" standard for exchanging content (alongside the secured version), people who rip stuff off and share it with their friends will use it. The only ways you can stop that are: (a) pass an unenforcable law like the DMCA, or (b) get rid of all "insecure" standards. Solution b is not workable because everyday life would grind to a halt if everything had to be authenticated with military-grade encrpytion. So we're stuck with the laws (which, incidentally, don't necessarily go away once the companies which bought them go bust).
My conclusion is, therefore, by all means adopt MPEG-4 because in almost every other way, it rocks. Don't be scared by the "rights management" bullshit, because as long it's optional, it's worthless.
--
anonymous CVS: geeks check in - they don't check out
These sigs are more interesting tha
I assume that when talking about MPEG-4, we're talking about the whole standard, and not just the MPEG-4 Video codec.
I can really see the MPEG-4 Video codec taking off, as it offers superior video quality for low-bandwidth connections, but the MPEG-4 standard as a whole...hmmm I don't know
Admitedly, I've stopped following the developments of the MPEG-4 standard closely, but the last I saw it was quite a bloated standard that incorporated the video codec, much of VRML and some Java scripting. All these parts of the standard are necessary for things like scene graph rendering of video objects (turing off backgrounds in video etc.), and interactivity.
Unless a subset of this functionality (profile) is decided on for internet use, I can't see the whole standard taking off. However, I think that the video codec on its own has a lot of potential.
------------ jay*arr*tee
It is from Sigma Designs. They make PC cards, too, but none yet with this particular chip. And, oh, yes, they support Linux. Read the specs, though.