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."

Comments

Ogg Theora?

[bcmm]

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.

Hello, there are open-source players for WMV3

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

realplayer

[Phil246]

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

looking at it from their perspecive

[noigmn]

"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.

Re:looking at it from their perspecive

[bmo]

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%

Yeah?

Where did you get your numbers?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

Aggregate IE: 59.9
Firefox: 29.9
Mozilla: 2.5
Netscape 7/8 .2
Opera 1.5

Which one of those doesn't pass the Acid2? Only IE. 40 percent of the world uses a browser that supports standards enough to render Acid2, and IE's numbers have declined while the rest have only gained.

"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."

If you scroll down to the OS stats:

XP: 71.6
Win2K 13.6
Win98 2.6
WinNT .3
W2k3 1.7
Linux 3.2
Mac 3.3

But then it's not about "supporting linux" it's about using _standard_ codecs and standard files. Wmv is "Windows Only" and not a standard where other codecs are actual standards and are cross platform as a _result_ of being standards.

But hey, you're here to troll for Microsoft instead of contribute any facts to the discussion.

By the way, even though it has the least market share, Opera kicks all other browsers.

--
BMO

Re:looking at it from their perspecive

[Frosty Piss]

Where did you get your numbers?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]

Aggregate IE: 59.9

Firefox: 29.9

Mozilla: 2.5

Netscape 7/8 .2

Opera 1.5

The stats at www.w3schools.com are not representative of what most people are using, they represent what Web developers and other technically inclined people are using. Think about who visits www.w3schools.com.

Re:looking at it from their perspecive

[Daniel Phillips]

Linux, 0.37%

Your numbers are suspect. According to the market research company IDC, 25% of servers and 2.8% of desktop computers ran Linux as of 2004. This is consistent with the 3.3% share of web hits that w3schools measures as of last month.

Re:Where's the illegal?

[iamdrscience]

What's so illegal about a Flash-based streaming player?

Flash embedded video is not a bad idea, but currently the latest version of flash available for Linux is Flash Player 7 which doesn't have support for all the video features added in Flash 8 and Flash 9. They could do it, they would just have to be mindful of the limitations of Flash 7 when they were setting it up. Either that or set it up as flash video and hope that Adobe releases Flash 9 for Linux soon (they've already got a prerelease available here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/)

No codecs required, either

[Shawn is an Asshole]

If you use Cortado as the player. It's a java applet that will play Theora+Vorbis files in a way similar to YouTube/Google Video/etc. All the client needs is Java.

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:

In order to make your streams as widely available as possible, we provide the Cortado Java applet as free software under the GPL. By embedding this applet in your website, you can give viewers access to streams from either the Flumotion streaming server or play a local file from your server without the need for a locally installed media player supporting the correct formats on the visitori's computer.

Cortado currently include Java decoders for Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, Mulaw audio, MJPEG and our own Smoke codec. You can find examples of Cortado in use on the Fluendo demo site.

Re:Please don't do this

[evilviper]

Theora isn't ready to go, it's not even remotely ready.

Really? Why?

There's a reason why it's still an alpha whereas Vorbis is a full release.

And that reason is???

It's much better to admit there's nothing that works out there that's OSS than to recommend a poor OSS solution.

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've no doubt in time Theroa will be its match,

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.

Re:Please don't do this

[CryoPenguin]

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.

Re:Why is WMV so popular anyways?

[Air-conditioned cowh]

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,

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 /could/ but no one was offering any format it supports.

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).

Re:What is wrong with QuickTime, its open

[evilviper]

Why dont people just use the quicktime package format,

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.