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."

Comments

Hack

[rodrigoandrade]

I'm sure devs will figure out a way to run 3rd party codecs on Win7 and future Windows.

BTW, ts TFA just FUD or a guy promoting his own agenda??

Re:Hack

[eldavojohn]

BTW, ts TFA just FUD or a guy promoting his own agenda??

He's probably disappointed that Microsoft won't license his codec from him and pay him lots of money for lots of installs that will rarely use it.

Wow, am I the only person that read the article? From Matroska's Wikipedia entry:

Matroska is an open standards project. This means it is free to use, and that the technical specifications describing the bit stream are open to anybody, including companies that would like to support it in their products. The source code of the libraries developed by the Matroska Development Team is licensed under GNU LGPL. In addition to that, there are also free parsing and playback libraries available under the BSD license, for proprietary hardware and software adoption.

The only thing this guy's guilty of is trying to get everyone to use his LGPL developed stuff and lamenting on DRM and proprietary crap they have to deal with. Get off his back.

Re:Hack

[harryandthehenderson]

Matroska is a container format that has existed for many years before CoreCodec co-opted it. The issue at heart for this topic though is about their proprietary DirectShow codec CoreAVC which will be obsoleted by the Windows Media Foundation which is why the company is whining and in arms.

Re:Hack

[DigitAl56K]

Microsoft is not "obsoleting" products. They are providing their own solutions, which are in some cases inferior to competing solutions (performance, acceleration, features, quality), and:

* Preventing WMP/MCE using competing solutions whereas all previous versions of WMP were more open
* Changing the way DirectShow works so that without a custom graph builder third-party DirectShow applications will now also prefer Microsoft decoders for certain formats over any other regardless of filter merits

This in place of, for example, better designing their new media architecture (media foundation) to allow easy management of what gets used via API/UI as a solution to the problem.

It's a proprietary software vendor who is mad that Microsoft is obsoleting his company's products.

Even if that was true, there's a reason that product bundling is contentious and why Microsoft has been on the wrong end of various anti-trust cases. Maybe promoting consumer choice is less important these days? The MSDN documentation, and registry keys (yet unfilled) in the Windows 7 RC also imply that in addition to preferring filters they can also blacklist others so that intelligent connect will ignore them. Let's hope we don't see to much of that and only for good reason.

Re:Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a link in TFA pointing to a disucssion about over-smoothing in the MS ASP decoder, AFAIK MS decoders are not providing CUDA accelerated decode whereas CoreAVC is, AFAIK DivX ASP SW decode is faster than MS ASP SW decode, FFDShow offers a ton of post-processing effects and subtitle support that MS decoders are not offering.

And what would that even look like? It's hard to imagine users with codec problems beign able to take good advantage of that kind of control.

It might look like an API where you have some functions:

BeginFilterInstall()
RegisterFilter()
EndFilterInstall()

And then you see a dialog box which says "This installer has registered new filters capable of decoding the following formats. For each format you can choose to use the newly installed filters or the current defaults. [Select all] [Select None]". This UI could also be accessible from the Start menu. That's just one idea I came up with off the top of my head. It's a bit like when UAC prompts for permissions to install software. Microsoft managed to create a "Set Programs Access and Defaults" when the EU pushed them to do so for various other types of software. Microsoft managed to have a way to manage addons in IE and disable them if there were any problems. With years to develop Windows 7 and the new media framework they could come up with nothing?

And this is not about users with codec problems. It's about users who want the ability to select what is best for them. To say the only reason someone might want to try something other than what MS is providing is for troubleshooting is misleading the conversation I think.

Unfortunately, this one may work

[querist]

Unfortunately, Microsoft may get away with this under the guise of concern for security. There was a time (and perhaps these are still out there) when links to fake codec were used to compromise the victim's computer. (For an analysis of one of these, please see http://www.lavasoftsupport.com/index.php?showtopic=5302 )

Most of us here know how this scenario unfolds: user is trying to view some form of media, often of "questionable" morality (either pr0n or "pirated" video) and the site claims that the user must install a new codec or upgrade to a new version of Flash or Quicktime or whatever and "kindly" has the link right there. It may even have the simple "click here" puzzle-piece link to install the proper codec/player so you can see the multimedia clip. Victim clicks, wanting simply to see the media clip, and presto!, the victim's machine is now a spam-spewing zombie.

Of course, the link could install other things, too, but the point is that the "fake codec" ploy is common enough that Microsoft could easily claim that they are only allowing "approved" or "signed" codecs out of concern for security. They may state that third party codecs are allowed, and will permit Quicktime (for fear of a suit and driving people to Apple) and Flash/Shockwave, but other third-party codecs could be blocked through some combination of testing and/or certificate/signing fees.

This one is too easy, and it just might work.

(I find it strangely amusing that the captcha, given that these fake codecs are often seen in relation to pr0n sites, is "explicit".)

Re:Unfortunately, this one may work

[harryandthehenderson]

Unfortunately, Microsoft may get away with this under the guise of concern for security.

There is nothing to "get away with". They are just attempting to obsolete DirectShow just as they did with VfW and this is a maker of a small-time directshow codec that is mad over this change. Last time I checked, Microsoft had no obligation to continue using and support DirectShow indefinitely.

Re:Unfortunately, this one may work

[DigitAl56K]

You are wrong.

They are changing the way DirectShow's intelligent connect works so that "preferred" filters, Microsoft's preferred filters that is (which happen to be Microsoft filters), are used for certain formats before the established DirectShow merit-based system is even consulted.

I believe the same is true of Media Foundation, in that for either architecture you now need to implement custom code to avoid this default behavior.

What Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

A monopoly is when you have no competition. Sorry but all linux and mac do is spew out how great their numbers are growing. Abusing their OS? It's their piece of software, they can do what they want with it, it's YOUR choice to use it if you wish.

MKV == critical mass?

[fahrvergnugen]

We've been waiting for years for a killer video container, and it appears to me that mkv is probably going to be the one. It seems poised to become the mp3 of video. There's finally a container that can be played back in an acceptable number of hardware devices, with acceptable quality, at acceptable filesizes. The lack of file-embedded metadata in the container is still a problem, one that's been holding back online video distribution for years, but external sites such as imdb and thetvdb seem to be working around this well enough.

iPod / iTunes took off like a rocket imho because of a few key factors:
-They created hardware that followed the pipe dream of the mp3: A portable player capable of holding many gigs of music in the size of a deck of cards, with headphone out. This wasn't innovation, such solutions were already on the market, but theirs was the most beautiful.;
-They smoothed out the rough usability edges in existing portable hdd player solutions by offering great desktop software in iTunes, which took advantage of metadata to create not only a really compelling library system, but also provided very tight integration that was intuitively the same across the iPod & iTunes.
-They offered a legal means of acquiring music on demand for their solution.
-They made it ridiculously easy to use their device with black market content.

Because Apple were the first with the sack to give people their dream device, with a sensible organized interface, a legal means of acquiring content, and full integration with illegal content, they dominated the marketplace.

Video has been held back, as I said above, by a couple of things. The first was the lack of file-embedded metadata (I can't search for all files in my library directed by James Cameron, for instance), but the ubiquity of always-on wireless connections has solved some of that, and external metadata references are now acceptable. Second, it's been held back by codecs & containers that were way out of date, and don't deliver broadcast-quality (especially HDTV) at acceptable filesizes. The average mp4 vs a highly compressed digital cable channel might be equivalent, but the market wants DVD quality without any sacrifice from downloaded video.

Finally, video has also been held back by the lack of elegant playback solutions. Apple missed the boat with the AppleTV by failing to step up and partner with the black market, which is why the device hasn't been a wild success. Software solutions based on the xbmc core, such as boxee, plex, and uh.... xbmc, are doing much better, but they're still software solutions dependent on having a PC. People want a fully-integrated solution.

Mark my words: The first company with the temerity to market a device that will take a user's existing library and integrate it into an elegant set-top solution is going to CLEAN UP. They will dominate the set-top completely for years to come. It looks like TiVO is going to miss the boat, as is Apple. Are there any dark horses in this race?

Lest anyone think that I'm pipe dreaming, a working solution can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts right now. Here's what I built in a weekend for about $700:

Hardware:
-Mac Mini c2d (winter '09)
-Harmony 720 remote
-DisplayPort --> HDMI cable
-Optical Audio cable
-1TB firewire-800 external storage from pricewatch

Software:
-Plex
-SwitchResX (only necessary for SDTV or older HDTVs)
-RipIt
-SABNZBD+

Subscriptions:
-Usenet service ($11/mo)
-Unnamed usenet header indexer ($.75 / week, roughly)
-rss feed for TV show subscriptions (free)

With these pieces, I've built a DVR that automatically downloads the shows I like the same day they air. Downloads are FAST, maxing out my internet connection. I can play back 1080p blu-ray rips with full surround sound & 0 dropped frames or stuttering. I can drop any DVD into the reader, and have it copied into the library and spit back out again once it's done. And it's all done with a universal remote in

Re:Dire Straits?

[gnick]

I wasn't saying it was anything super-symbolic (male prostitution or drug dealing), but the delivery guys are clearly just a framing element for a commentary on the writers' perception of MTV's perversion of music and the direction that it was moving. A bunch of over-hyped crap from no-talent schmucks being sold to the public at ridiculous rates while the public laps it up. I interpret it as a fairly critical view on MTV's influence on music evolution. Maybe it's just me.

(Karma bonus foregone (again) because I think we're completely off-topic from TFA.)

XML: EBML vs. ASN/XDR

[Anonymous Coward]

XML:

  Pros: Human readable

  Cons: Slow to parse, inconvenient to write parsers for, space-inefficient.

Define "slow". I/O has long been the bottleneck in performance; most CPUs are idling and have cores to spare. What's the difference between XML that's compressed and EBML? And while the second 'con' may be valid, I think there are enough well-written parsers out there that it can be mitigated: use a library and don't try to roll your own.

If you want fixed-format binary encoding use ASN or XDR. As Tim Bray (one of the editors of the XML spec writes):

I don't care if anyone wants to go off and produce their own data interchange format, binary or not, open or not, standardized or not, mapped to XML or not; as long as they don't call it XML. "Binary XML" is an oxymoron.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/04/01/Binary-XML