SMPTE Adoption Of WMV9 Hits Some Snags

SysKoll writes "EETimes is running an interesting story about the future of the video codecs for HD DVDs. The Redmond Beast convinced both the Blu-ray Disc Association and the DVD Forum to adopt its WMV9 video codec over MPEG4 for the upcoming VC-1 standard that is mandated for high-definition video devices. That was a huge coup for MS. Now it turns out that Microsoft cheated and lied: its code is not as good as MPEG 4, the WMV9 reference implementation is not available, and the WMV9 test suite does not exercise all the features. The SMPTE might drop WMV9 after all. Apparently, a highly technical standard body is harder to snowjob than the usual clueless consumers."

Comments

The Redmond Beast?

[DaveCBio]

Come on. Is it really necessary to interject this crap with every article on Microsoft?

Re:Why on earth would anyone use WMV or WMA?

[DigiShaman]

Screw compression. With harddrive space so cheap, I rip my CDs into RAW or WAV format baby!!! Pure, clean, and unspoiled!

Re:big suprise there

[phrostie]

not only is it a good thing it's a feature!

Re:Well it's surprising.

[arivanov]

There is a long industry tradition here. For example most RSA reference code has interesting "omissions". Classic example is MD4 for which the reference implementation does not work on 64 bit and big endian and has a number of code paths that are effectively if (1) {} without the else. That is besides lack of error checking and a few paths with NULL derefs in them. At the same time they were shipping software which had the MD4 transform, but was perfectly on Solaris (big endian) and Tru64 (big endian and 64 bit).

There are a few others though none of them so spread around as RSA.

Re:Snowjob

[Spolster]

You're *that* flexible?