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: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.