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Council of the EU Says "We Cannot Support Linux"
An anonymous reader writes "The Council of the EU has a streaming service so that we can watch its meetings — but the service can only be accessed by Mac or MS Windows users. This is because they employ WMV format for the videos. In the FAQ they express a really strange opinion about this: 'The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.' An online petition has been set up to create pressure to convince the EU council to change its service to one that is platform independent."
Ogg Theora?
And even if you think it is illegal to watch MPEG on Linux in the EU, the crime would be committed by the veiwer, not the broadcaster.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
WMV3 has been opened. MPlayer / FFMPEG support it natively now. Google Summer of Code had a project to make an optimized player for it.
Yes I think it still has patent issues or something but in Europe I don't think that matters.
yes yes, i know. Put the burning torches down :) - Still if the BBC can offer their video services in both WMV and Realmedia formats, why cant the EU?
Its certainly supported on linux after all
"The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union supports Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Netscape Navigator 6 and higher. If you encounter problems with a lower version of your browser, the browser should be updated to facilitate the live streaming media service. Firefox and Opera will be supported with a minimal of functionalities."
This is the market share for browsers as of Nov 2006:
Microsoft Internet Explorer, 80.56%
Firefox, 13.50%
Safari, 4.03%
Netscape, 0.83%
Opera, 0.67%
This is the market share for Operating Systems as of Nov 2006:
Windows XP, 84.95%
Windows 2000, 5.46%
Mac OS, 4.10%
Windows 98, 1.90%
MacIntel, 1.29%
Windows ME, 0.91%
Windows NT, 0.76%
Linux, 0.37%
You could argue for better firefox support, but as much as we love linux, I suppose they have no obligation to make it work for something that is that small minority among desktop users.
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Going straight Theora+Vorbis wouldn't work that well, since the user would have the install the codecs first and Vorbis/Theora support is severely lacking on OS X.
Quoting the site:
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Really? Why?
And that reason is???
That wouldn't be true, of course.
The patents on MPEG-1 have long ago expired. It has pretty good quality (better than Theora/VP3) when encoded with a recent implimentation (ie. libavcodec for video, twolame for audio). And more than that, it is by far the most widely compatible format around, supported by just about every video player made in the past several years, on just about every single platform around.
I, however, do. The VP3 codec is hated by just about everyone who knows anything about video.
It has really poor video quality, compared to even much older video codecs.
It is very CPU-intensive to encode.
It's playback performance is horrible. Once you reach resolutions where a full frame can't fit in your CPU cache, you get performance worse than codecs like h.264.
In some 4 years of Theora's development, Xiph hasn't removed any of VP3's limitations, nor added any advantages over the original VP3 codec. Since they've frozen the bitstream, even the potential for them to do any of that has passed...
I was somewhat active in the Theora development process some time ago, but I've long since given it up for dead.
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The Ogg bitstream is also hated by just about everyone who knows anything about media file formats. If you're going to propose a new standard Free media format, please use something like Matroska or NUT instead.
And the answer to your question is: no, Snow and Dirac can't be easily inserted into Ogg. Ogg's inability to handle arbitrary codecs is one of the reasons I don't recommend Ogg.
The council of the European Union also doesn't support Firefox or Opera to there full extend. They say that them self right here, http://ceuweb.belbone.be/faq.php?lang=EN
And I quote.
"In what browsers can I view the live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union?
The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union supports Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Netscape Navigator 6 and higher. If you encounter problems with a lower version of your browser, the browser should be updated to facilitate the live streaming media service. Firefox and Opera will be supported with a minimal of functionalities: No possibilities to use the Table Of contents for positioning the streaming. All the buttons for the player will disappear and the standard buttons of the player must be used to control the stream."
There stream is nothing more then mms that works with mplayer of properly configured at the servers end. This is a typical fuckup of a admin who doesn't actually know anything about computers and how to stream a video.
Definately. If an interested party would pick-up Snow, finalize the bitstream, and start adding some performance optimizations for encoding and high-def playback, it could beat-out every other video codec out there. The quality/bitrate is easily better than even h.264, and can scale down to ridiculously low bitrates while being completely watchable.
Nope. SnoPenguin nailed it. Ogg is terribly codec-specific.
MKV is gaining in popularity, partly because it can handle just about any audio or video format, including Vorbis, as well as subtitles, menus, chapters, etc.
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Not at all. Linux users can play WMV video and audio. As of a few months ago, you don't even need the binary codec DLLs or an x86 system for the large majority of WMV video and audio formats.
The reason that's not openly supported by organizations, of course, is the patent licensing fees, which prevent most distros from including programs like MPlayer to begin with. Since the EU is repeatedly trying to get software patents into law, it would be rather hypocritical for them to suggest programs like MPlayer, wouldn't it?
Linux isn't the issue, it's just the reason it was posted on
The issue is a government that requires you to use commercial software to play. One that uses secret, undocumented file formats (even Real video would be a bad choice, in this regard). etc.
Quicktime, at least sticks with open and standard video/audio codecs, and MP4 container, despite the patent issues.
And if they put a little bit of effort into it, they could use patent-free formats as well.
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I recently had to organise a live webcast for a large (thousands) audience. What I found was that just about every company I approached pushed me into using WMV due to the following reasons,
/could/ but no one was offering any format it supports.
1) Also encoding for Real Player means extra encoding fees,
2) Although Flash claims to support live streaming, the license fees for it's servers to make a viable live streaming infrastructure are completely ridiculous so it is only good for progressive download.
3) No one offered any other format,
4) One of the largest networks in the world, Akamai, only has a small number of Real Server licenses left and they are dwindling due to lack of demand,
5) Live streaming from a whole network is a different ballgame to streaming from one server. Only Real and WMS can handle it properly. I know Icecast probably
From my own experience in smaller scale streaming I have not had much success using a Theroa/Icecast solution because there is no basic application just to grab V4L and convert it to a stream (I even tried coding one myself before running out of time and getting stumped since I lack the skills), though you can use ffmpeg2theroa to grab from a DV CAM. I tried Flumotion but it only seems to work with the latest and greatest version of Fedora at any given time. It's also way to complicated. Exactly what is all this "planet", "atmosphere", "streams" stuff about? I got nowhere fast trying to install it on CentOS4 which is what the enocding box runs (and I am not in a position to suddenly change OS since it does lots of other functions).
Send a protest by email, or better yet, written letter to them: streaming.helpline@consilium.europa.eu (technical) or Public.info@consilium.europa.eu (organizational),
Council of the European Union
Rue de la Loi, 175 B-1048 Bruxelles
Telephone (32-2) 281 61 11
Fax (32-2) 281 69 99
Contact your local/national members of the european parliament or even better, members of the council directly.
Microsoft and related industries has a lot of well paid lobbyists at the EU, open source advocates and private people who just want to use Linux as an alternative have nothing.
Make some pressure.
Because Quicktime is despised just slightly less than Ogg.
Off the top of my head:
Significant overhead.
Metadata at the end of files (like AVI).
This precluding good playback of partial files, and causes really terrible problems with partially damaged MOV files.
Unbelivably large number of different ways to do anything.
An unbelivably huge and complex standard that probably nobody on earth understands entirely.
14 different versions of the standard, and a field in the MOV header to dictate which version of the standard the player should use to read the file.
And finally: patents
If quicktime wasn't so horrible, you certainly wouldn't have ever seen formats like Ogg or MKV.
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ador wrote:
>One serious problem is that there are no working Theora VFW plugins (some exist, but they are unusable). You *have* to install VLC or mplayer.
I am an mplayer man, but Realplayer supports ogg, what is wrong with that? In the UK at least most people will have it as it is required for BBC and so on.
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