Native Sorenson Playback Comes to Linux

Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.

Comments

Licensing? Patents?

[JoshuaDFranklin]

Licensing? Patents?

Someone care to explain what the team did about
these little problems?

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[prockcore]

Yes please tell.. I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive (note, only video, the audio is QDM1 which I haven't done yet) I haven't released it due to blatent patent infringement :) but if Sorenson isn't going do to anything about it.. I may release it after all.

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[G-funk]

Stuff them, release it AC somewhere, post it here, then by the time somebody starts to "cease and desist" it'll be too late.

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[HeUnique]

Here's a snippet from an email which was posted on FFMPEG's mailing list:

From: Arpi
To: ffmpeg-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

Date: Yesterday 23:02:26

Hi,

I've just examined xine's fresh working SVQ1 decoder. It's implemented in a ~60k .c file, and uses a 90k .h containing the tables.

Looking at the source, it looks like SVQ1 is a tricky h263 variant - as gerard also noticed some time ago. They crypted (don't worry, just order
change and some xor) the first 4 bytes of the header, to hide it's a h263 one. Ah, and they replaced the patented DCT by recursive VQ.
And, they use YVU9 (chrominance 4x4 subsampled) instead of YV12 (2x2 subsampling).

So, as you can see, the SVQ1 guy who wrote the native decoder, replaced the sorenson patented stuff with something free..

Re:Licensing? Patents?

[Peter Harris]

1) Bad laws get made.

2) Laws are hard to remove once they are in place.

3) The only way to get real discussion on bad laws sometimes is to defy them.

4) It is not unethical per se to break a law. It's just that laws are generally made to prohibit unethical behaviour.

If the letter of the law also has the side-effect of prohibiting some ethical behaviour, what do you do? You do what your conscience permits and take responsibility for your own actions.

By the way, to head off any stupid straw-man arguments like "what if you think it's OK to kill children?", forget it. Stick to the point. If you have a real reason to believe it is OK for big corporations to restrict what ideas humans can think and write and implement in code, let's hear it.

Personally, I think it would be easier to defy the abuse of patents in this way than to defy the abuse of copyright law. It should be harder to make the case that someone is "stealing" something they wrote *themselves*.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Pathwalker]

Apple's QT streaming server is free and open source, and runs well on both Linux and FreeBSD.
You can download a precompiled version from here and the source code from here or by checking it out of their public CVS server.

Re:Linux is catchings up...

[1010011010]

application developers DONT WANT to target Linux

That's a problem, but the crappy sound support (OSS, Alsa will be better), non-existant color management (X says: what's that?), poor font support (-including-a-strange-30-year-old-craptacular-nami ng-convention),
"window managers" making window placement a quirky and non-standard thing, etc. -- are all much more serious problems.

I like Linux, it runs on my home computers 24/7. But, as Linus recently noted, "all the interesting stuff is on the desktop" -- it's where the most work is needed at the current time.

How many things in X will we need to fix?
* font support

* color management

* alpha blending support

* usable configuration (Think Mac, Windows, even BeOS)

* changing resolutions on the fly

* vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor -- from another computer.

This is NOT clean-room implemented

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the thread you will see that the author looked at Apple's QT binaries for codebooks to decode some of the encodings. I'm sure there are EULAs that prohibit this. This patch is going to have a lot of legal problems. That's a shame because it is a big boost for QT and thus for Apple, but that's the way it is. I grabbed a copy of it so that when they get an injunction from Apple I'll still be able to post it somewhere in the Free World (ie, not in the US).

YAXSP (Re:Linux is catchings up...)

[po8]

Oh man. Yet another "X sucks" troll. I have no idea why I waste my time with these, but here goes... (and in HTML, no less :-)

• Font support: Been out for a year. See Xft. Easier to use now with Xft2 and fontconfig.
• Color management: Been in Xlib for 15 freaking years. See XCMS in the documentation. Application developers never use it, because users never cal their monitors on PC hardware. But it works fine.
• Alpha blending support: Documentation on the Render extension has been out for a year. Implementation got done two weeks ago. Will be mainstream in a couple of months.
• Usable configuration: Working on it. "XFree86 -configure" is a step in the right direction. This is probably the most valid complaint on the list, but note that PC graphics and input hardware is notoriously hard to configure, even with Windows.
• Changing resolutions on the fly: part of the ResizeAndRotate extension. A working implementation of this part is done. Will be released shortly, when the rest of R&R is stable. Note that the ability to change resolutions on the fly has been around for as long as XFree86 via <ctrl><alt><keypad-+>, although the viewport property and the fact that existing apps don't rescale has made it less useful for some needs. It is fairly useful for accessability, though.
• VNC (or other RFB) server support: This wants to be done via client-side replication, not by bitmap-copying, which is wrong on so many levels. This work is starting now: I would guess about a year to completion. In the meantime, there are plenty of solutions for replicating the server side to another X display: do a web search if you are serious about this.

I could really stand folks spending 15 minutes doing research before writing these critiques. OTOH, I guess I was successfully trolled, so what do I know?

Not your average couch potato

[citizenkeller]

I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive

Man, that must have been uncomfortable!

Native is evil

[heroine]

Is it really politically correct to write native software for Linux anymore? Isn't the main focus of Linux now an emulation platform for Win32?