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Money For Nothing and the Codecs For Free
Davis Freeberg writes "In an in depth discussion on the codec industry, CoreCodec CEO and Matroska Foundation board member Dan Marlin shares his thoughts on the growing popularity of the MKV container, confusion in the marketplace between X.264/MKV and DivXHD and weighs in on a controversial decision by Microsoft to block third party filter support in future versions of Windows media player. His interview offers a behind the scenes look at an important piece of technology that is helping to power the P2P movement. It also raises the prickly question of whether or not Microsoft is abusing their OS monopoly, in order to rein in competition within the codec industry."
I think that if VLC runs on windows 7, 3rd party codecs will too.
VLC doesn't use external codecs. It uses the libavcodec library for playback. A completely different situation from that of CoreAVC which is an external directshow decoder.
However, Microsoft is making the new versions of media player less useful by not playing 3rd party codecs.
Well it can, it just requires some registry tweaks.
Because people don't know the difference between the standard which is called H.264 and the open source encoder that is an implementation of that standard which is called x264 (note the lack of the . as is the common incorrect spelling of its name).
Except that the CoreAVC codec, the CorePlayer, the two main products of CoreCodec, and their media splitter that is bundled with the CoreAVC codec are proprietary software. This isn't some open source project being squelched by Microsoft. It's a proprietary software vendor who is mad that Microsoft is obsoleting his company's products.
That reminds me of people who think .mp3 stands for MPEG-3 when in fact it's MPEG-1* Layer 3 audio.
* or MPEG-2 Layer 3, or even the so-called "MPEG-2.5 Layer 3", depending on the sampling rate.
Fake "codecs" are one of the main ways windows PCs currently get infected with spyware/viruses. This comes from all the people who install Limewire with no AV and then download the first thousand results for "porn".
VLC - has all codecs built-in. Use it. :)
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
The proper phrase is "dire straits", "strait" as in "a narrow place" -- "a tight squeeze". :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Youtube is not going vorbis+theora, their HTML5 experiment uses h.264.
Matroska is a container format that has existed for many years before CoreCodec co-opted it.
Speaking as someone that was involved with Matroska development from the beginning, and as someone that is not a member of CoreCodec, I just want to clarify this. Members of CoreCodec were actively involved in the development and PR of Matroska from the beginning. I don't know of any of the original Matroska development members that oppose what CC has done, and it seems that many actively support the actions of CC in regard to Matroska.
It's been my impression that Dan Marlin has, from the start, been supportive of Matroska as a way to make the world of video "right". Business decisions and plans that leverage Matroska seemed to come afterward, such that the involvement Matroska was never directly dependent on a successful business model.