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Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the exfat-is-not-skinny dept.

alphadogg writes "Microsoft Thursday announced a broadening of its licensing program around its exFAT file system, which is designed to handle large multimedia files. Microsoft hopes companies making devices such as cameras and smartphones will adopt the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology to support the sharing of audio and video files. The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE."

42 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. I wish... by mb1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...I was exFAT.

  2. EEE by TheUni · · Score: 4, Funny

    Embrace

    ---- You are here ----
    Extend

    Extinguish

    (Thanks slashdot formatting-filter for making me sacrifice my ascii art skills.)

    1. Re:EEE by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Interesting

      EEE only applies to open standard Microsoft targets.

      It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones and XBox at least). Later, when they need to expand their market, they will wipe out the multi-media companies that have become locked in.

      The thing is, and I know this from working in a potential victim company and discussing with the person who was negotiating with MS for media standards, that the extinguish is at least five years away. Almost nobody working in such a company cares about that far in the future.

      Only companies, like Oracle, which decide to fight Microsoft from the beginning as hard as they can, will ever survive long term in such a market.

      --
      =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
  3. Why? by Teun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why, when you can pick up ext2 for free?

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    1. Re:Why? by Teun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You'll need to develop and install a driver anyway, why not take an existing one that's unencumbered?

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    2. Re:Why? by hitmark · · Score: 4, Insightful

      simple, the only non-microsoft formats that windows supports out of the box are cd and dvd media.

      i wonder how long it will take before microsoft gets a slap on the wrist over this...

      new microsoft, same as old microsoft...

      --
      comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
    3. Re:Why? by peppepz · · Score: 2, Interesting
      What about UDF? It's already supported out of the box on removable media by Windows Vista and higher.
      Open standard, tons of features, fast on flash media, broad adoption by existing operating systems and devices.

      They should use it instead of inventing yet another file system with less features. And closed, too (so much for Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards).

    4. Re:Why? by oglueck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, the CD-ROM standard they support is "Joliet". Which is their own extension.... I wonder how long until they are going with patents after others implementing it.

    5. Re:Why? by Renegrade · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Almost every computer available? Hardly. From the article: "The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE". That's it. The Win 98, 2000, and XP systems you'll find in the wild won't support it. Some of the older systems (ie, XP) can be patched with an update from Microsoft, but are you going to carry a second removable media device with FAT16 or FAT32 around with you and install this patch everywhere you go? And bring XP or later as well for those machines running 98/NT4/2K? I don't believe there's Apple support either, and Linux support is still experimental.

      I haven't seen the spec for exFAT (I'm not paying some fee to see a spec for some microsoft cruft), but I imagine it's another vendor-lockin, poor-performance-substitute abomination like NTFS was, or WinFS will be.

    6. Re:Why? by peppepz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Of course! But starting from Vista, it's supported on all other media, too. So what's the need for exFat? I think UDF might cover all of exFat's use cases, with no patents pending and secret specifications involved.

    7. Re:Why? by A+Friendly+Troll · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, the CD-ROM standard they support is "Joliet". Which is their own extension.... I wonder how long until they are going with patents after others implementing it.

      ISO-9660 doesn't support Unicode. Believe it or not, some languages use characters that aren't part of ASCII.

      ISO-9660 doesn't support lower case letters, spaces and multiple dots in file/directory names.

      There's nothing wrong with naming a directory "Family Photos 25.12.2009." - if Joliet didn't exist, we'd have to burn that to CD as "FAMILYPHOTOS25122009".

    8. Re:Why? by vrmlguy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS.

      In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"? For that matter, why not just use UDF? It's designed for all optical media, not just DVDs, and has supported Unicode for almost a decade.

      --
      Nothing for 6-digit uids?
    9. Re:Why? by MrMr · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think UDF might cover all of exFat's use cases, with no patents pending and secret specifications involved.
      So where's the profit in that?

    10. Re:Why? by Megane · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I can't believe that MacOS X doesn't have native EXT2/3 support

      Blame the GPL license. Most of OS X is under a BSD-style license. Is there even a BSD-licensed EXT2/3 implementation?

      There is a pre-built version that you can download and install yourself, however.

      Also, the only people who need it are the 2% who use Linux. 2% of 5% isn't much, especially when OS X users have much less need to keep Linux around than Windows users.

      And we OS X users already have a very nice filesystem, thank you very much. Apple did add an amazing number of hacks to it so that it can do Unix-y things like inodes and hard links, but it works very well. It can even be made case sensitive should we ever want to compile Linux. (A million curses on whoever required case sensitive filenames in the netfilter code.)

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  4. Re:I smell DRM by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do you always look at Microsoft will "all" the disdain?

    Experience.

    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... umm... you won't get fooled again.

    Snide comments aside, it's simply that it's been too many times the case. Of course MS is in the business to make money. But to that end, vendor lock-in is one of the golden tickets to cash cows. If you can monopolize, you can charge whatever you want and nobody can undercut you. You can dictate price, conditions and format, what your user may or may not do with your tools and so on.

    Yes, MS is in the business to make money. And doing what we "accuse" them to do is the easiest, most profitable and most sustainable way. So I guess we might be correct?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. Microsoft and Making Money by ztransform · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game.

    Creating a software product and selling it is fair enough. Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.

    That's like the power company deciding to sell you power. Then charging you license fees for installing power sockets in your home that conform to the standard.

    1. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by TrancePhreak · · Score: 2, Funny

      You are obviously not a certified electrician.

      --

      -]Phreak Out[-
    2. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.

      What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.

      I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it. If it is a sin to hope that your product is popular, then most of the companies in the world are going to hell.

      Finally, why is charging a license fee for something evil? If you don't want to pay to use it, then don't use it. That is the same argument as saying if you don't want people to see your source code, don't incorporate GPL code into it.

    3. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by Tapewolf · · Score: 5, Informative

      What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.

      I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it.

      Everything that wants to SDXC will have to use exFAT. It's part of that standard. This is going to be inconvenient for anyone who wants to use their shiny new camera/camcorder on a Mac or linux netbook or someone else's XP machine.

    4. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by peppepz · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.

      So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.

    5. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by Tapewolf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT, I consider this to be a bad move by the association rather than Microsoft.

      That may be. It has the same net result though.

    6. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by vrmlguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.

      So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.

      Is there any reason why you can't use UDF on flash media? It's designed for media that wears out with too many writes, so it seems like a perfect fit. And recent (since ~2000) versions support Unicode, so you can use Tengwar Sindarin for your file names.

      --
      Nothing for 6-digit uids?
    7. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by melstav · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, exFAT is part of the new SD specifications. So is FAT32.

      What's really interesting about the exFAT specification is the terms of the license it's under (at least through the SD Association)

      If you need access to the standard so you can build a device (or program) that will only need to understand the contents of the filesystem when it's accessed in a read-only manner, you don't actually have to pay a licensing fee. So, an MP3/4 player won't need a paid license for exFAT. It's only if the device needs to *WRITE* to the filesystem (such as a camera) that a paid license is required.

    8. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT

      Of course they did.

      Microsoft do not support third-party file system drivers. It's certainly possible to write them, but documentation is scarce, there are few tools available, and it's intended for use only in embedded systems. It's not possible to provide the same level of integration as the Microsoft-provided drivers, since none of the disk management tools are extensible by anyone but Microsoft. The IFS drivers themselves are far more complicated than filesystem drivers in any other operating system, since they have to implement functionality that is normally provided by the operating system's VFS layer, and that functionality isn't well documented. Basically, all existing third-party IFS drivers suck.

      The SDXC committee needed the memory cards to be usable on Windows, ideally without installing any drivers, and without having to screw around to get it to work. NTFS is completely unsuitable for flash storage, and is far too complex to implement in an embedded device anyway (not that Microsoft actually license any part of NTFS out to third parties anyway).

      That leaves UDF, which can not be used on anything but optical discs in Windows XP, FAT16, which can't be used for drives larger than 2GB, and FAT32. FAT32 can actually scale well into the terabyte range, but Windows will refuse to format a disk as FAT32 if it's larger than 32GB.

      Microsoft's solution was exFAT. The selection of exFAT instead of FAT32 was forced by limitations on Windows' FAT32 support. These limitations were intentional - the idea was to get people to use NTFS instead of FAT32. The only party to benefit from this situation is Microsoft - they get to sell licenses for their (apparently) patented new filesystem, which they can't do with FAT32 (cameras never used the patented VFAT extensions). In addition, they get to kill off one of their own filesystems, which was being used as a common interchange filesystem between completely different systems, none of which needed to run Windows, or use any Microsoft technology.

    9. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Speaking of the intentional FAT32 limitations...
      Try formatting a drive bigger than 32GB with fat32 on win2k, win98, linux or macos, it works fine..
      With XP they crippled that functionality for no other reason than to force people to use the more proprietary ntfs.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    10. Re:Microsoft and Making Money by melstav · · Score: 2, Informative

      You don't have to understand the filesystem to be able to write data to it, as long as something else is telling you where to put the bytes.

      So, for example, an SD-Card reader doesn't have to have a paid license because the card reader doesn't have to understand the filesystem. All it has to know about is reading and writing blocks. The OS has to know how exFAT works if that's the filesystem on the media.

  6. Latest in a long line of suck by sco08y · · Score: 3, Insightful

    FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project. FAT32 and exFAT (aka FAT64) just take the same mistakes and repeat them.

    The fact that FAT32 is widely available is irrelevant; everyone will still have to install drivers.

    So, yes, there's a demand for a simple (needing little CPU and RAM) filesystem. There's even an argument to be made that it should honor the same overall contracts that FAT does so that device manufacturers don't have to put lots of extra logic in. But it does *not* need to be the spawn of FAT.

    1. Re:Latest in a long line of suck by dargaud · · Score: 3, Interesting

      FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project.

      Quite so. I remember writing an experimental filesystem for 3" (not 3 1/2") floppies on the Oric in 1982, making up my own concepts as I had no experience in the matter. It didn't really work but it wsa good learning. Then a couple years later I looked at the details of FAT and was surprised by how simple, similar and limited it actually was.

      --
      Non-Linux Penguins ?
  7. Just great... by MojoRilla · · Score: 5, Insightful
    And the best news...

    The SD Association has adopted exFAT for its SDXC memory card specification.

    So a mediocre but patent encumbered technology gets adopted as a standard because it runs out of the box on Windows. As Microsoft itself puts it, "exFAT is relatively simple". Hello, antitrust regulators? Hello, patent office?

    1. Re:Just great... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's still a FAT variant, which means that seeking in a file is an O(n) operation (it's O(log(n)) on most systems) in terms of the size of the file. They've added a free space bitmap, but creating and appending to a file is still O(n) in terms of the size of the disk, just with a smaller constant. Both the FAT and the free space bitmap need to be kept in RAM for reasonable performance. The FAT size depends on the disk size and the configuration, but a typical 32GB memory card will need 32MB for the FAT. This is a lot of memory for a mobile device. Something like the N900 has 32GB of Flash and only 256MB of RAM. You're using an eighth of the RAM just for the FAT. More if you add another memory card, and that's not counting the free space bitmap (also needs to be in RAM, but is quite a bit smaller), ACL or file caches or any other driver overhead.

      Oh, and the FAT itself needs to have individual words updated in a large contiguous section, which is about the slowest operation possible for Flash. They could improve this by using -1 instead of 0 to indicate free sectors: then allocating a sector would not require erasing a flash sector, but deallocating would.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Just great... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Informative

      SD, the camera manufacturers are free to make cameras that support other formats.

      But they won't, because Microsoft will use its privileged position as the sole controller of "security" updates for its desktop monopoly OS to automatically push this encumbered filesystem to the vast majority of computers in use. No camera or card maker could ever hope to surmount that barrier and install enough filesystem drivers to reach critical mass of general adoption.

      Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly position OSes to generate royalties in the unrelated camera market. That looks like an antitrust violation to me.

    3. Re:Just great... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, because nobody expects a file system to be part of an operating system!

      That's not the problem. The problem is that this royalty-generating file system will be part of most cameras and other gadgets.

      If it was one unsupported by Windows, simply include a file system driver to be installed alongside the drivers and utilities that come with most cameras.

      Countless others on this story have pointed out why that is not practical. Installing a driver takes significant effort and administrative rights on the system. User will not go through this effort if Microsoft has already installed their proprietary driver through their unique back channel that nobody else has access to.

      In theory, nobody is "holding a gun their head" keep people from adopting a different file system for cameras. Also in theory, quantum fluctuations could cause a tiny flying pig to materialize on my desk. In reality, neither is going to happen. You know it, I know it, and Microsoft knows it.

  8. Re:I smell DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, it's because everytime I come near a machine running windows, I lose around half of my nerves from all the

    -EULAs,
    -"Yes, please send all my personal data to Microsoft and/or McAffee, Delle, Evilcporp"-checkboxes,
    -"YOU ARE A THIEF UNLESS YOU PROVE OTHERWISE"-'advantage'-dialogs,
    -"Logging off"-Screens that stay on for 10 minutes before the computer shuts down
    -"There are important updates", "there are more updates, "are you sure you want to do this", "I have a message" "ballons"
    -"No you can't connect more than a single person via RDP, it's not allowed"
    -"what do you mean 'virtualize'? Do you have a license for that ?"
    -"Updating media player? Give us access to all your stuff"
    -"non-localized EULAs"
    -crashes
    - Start your computer? Wait 15 minutes to go through through some updates.
    - "Your Visual Studio 'forgot' how to display the search/replace dialog ? Why don't you reset all the personalizations you made, or start with a fresh profile?"

    At this point I decided that I that really valued my sanity, and quit my job developing for .NET.

    "Have some faith he" said...
    "what's wrong with licensing?" he said..

    "If we wanted Microsoft to 'donate' their software for 'free'" he asked.
    No. Not really, me personally I am trying not using their stuff, and I am successfull not even being anywhere near it atm.

    However I want Microsoft to 'donate' for 'free' dataformats they are using so that all of us could exchange data, and if we didn't like an application or one wasn't available for our platform that was using said format, we could write our own. And maybe if it was better than theirs they could say, "Hey look at what that bloke is doing, maybe if we would ask nicely, he would let us integrate parts of his functionality into our own application", and then I would say "Yes sure, I was also liking that one feature there, could I maybe also...? " and then they would say, "yes sure, why don't we invite this developer over there as well ?"
    And then we could develop the stuff we need together and get to do much more of the dataprocessing done that we actually want to do, instead of fighting over stupid licenses or writing complicated copyprotection-software that never works.

    A man can dream....

  9. Re:SDHC readers by peppepz · · Score: 2, Informative

    Microsoft realeased an updated SDHCI driver for windows XP which is supposed to support SDHC cards. But since it has not been distributed with Windows Update, I suppose it could have some problem. I've never tested it.

  10. Re:I smell DRM by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are you serious? I wonder, have you ever heard of:

    * The AARD code?
    * OOXML?
    * The Halloween documents?
    * Embrace, extend and extinguish?
    * Samizdat?

    "Have some faith", you say? Indeed, to trust Microsoft to act ethically is a matter of faith: to believe in something incredible against all evidence.

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  11. Re:ext is on MSWindows but not widely known by Sterling+Christensen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That driver has a serious user-unfriendly limitation: No support for inodes larger than 128 bytes.

    This means Linux users can't use GUI tools to format a USB stick (or a harddisk partition for sharing files with Windows) - they must use the command line and figure out how to persuade mkfs.ext2 not to default to 256 byte inodes. And this probably after learning of this limitation the hard way. Easy enough for you and me, but definitely not user friendly.

    Also, this still leaves Windows users unable to format as ext2. A crashy driver is not enough.

    That brings me to the third problem: I have yet to see a stable IFS (Installable FileSystem) driver for Windows. In my experience, perfectly stable Windows installations start crashing when an IFS driver is installed and in use. I suspect this part of Windows needs more debugging, or the API needs to be better documented, or both.

    exFAT may be a patent encumbered extension to a lame filesystem, but the ext2 drivers for Windows are a lousy counter proposal.

  12. Re:It also is supported by Windows XP by peppepz · · Score: 2, Insightful
    People can do without NTFS on a portable disk, because the only reason to use it is to interoperate with Windows. Which supports other file systems, so there is choice.
    People won't be able to do without exFAT, because (if, and when, the standard gets adopted) it will be the file system used by consumer electronics devices. Which won't likely support more than one file system, so there will be no choice.

    The beauty of digital storage for media is the freedom for the user to access his data in every way he sees fit. Closed standards for *personal* media storage are a step in the opposite direction.

  13. Re:I smell DRM by Nerdfest · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's right, we 'Won't get Fooled Again' ... hmmm

    *Takes sunglasses off, a la Caruso*

    It's time to ... cut the exFAT

    Yeeeeeaaaaahhh!!!!!!!!!!

  14. Re:I smell DRM by pesc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...Microsoft is in the business of making money...

    No, that is a secondary goal. The first priority for Microsoft is control, technology ownership and monopolization. Even at a financial loss.

    See IE, XBOX, dotnet, Silverlight, etc, etc

    --

    )9TSS
  15. Re:I smell DRM by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game. What's wrong with that? Did you want Microsoft to go the Linux way and "donate" the software for "free?"

    Get a life...Have some faith.

    Well, what is wrong in the customers resisting the profit motivated actions of their vendors? Customers have as much right to protect their money as does Microsoft have for making their profits.

    Some actions of the vendors, including Microsoft, enhances the productivity and competitiveness of their customers. Rightfully the vendors, including Microsoft, are entitled to a share of the extra profits generated. But some other actions by the vendor, does not enhance the productivity or competitiveness of their clients, and the customer would be better served by switching to a competitor of the current vendor. Actions by the current vendor that prevents this switch by vendor lock would hamper the clients from employing their money, maximizing their profits etc. And we have as much right to highlight to potential long term danger and make everyone aware of it.

    Why is Microsoft and its apologists are so against people making informed decisions? Vendor lock is real. Companies are hurting from it.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  16. UTF-8 by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Also, does it support Unicode?

    Anything that supports the full 8-bit range of code units supports Unicode in the UTF-8 encoding.

  17. Re:Could any MS file system be that impressive? by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your point illustrates exactly why microsoft having so much influence over the industry is such a bad thing, and why many people despise the way microsoft do business...

    Because of their size and influence, the world will end up stuck with the inferior exfat filesystem regardless of what else is available or how superior it is... MS will achieve this by ensuring their widely used os simply doesn't support anything else out of the box, making exfat the only option for many... This is also how fat32 got so widespread, despite also being total garbage.

    --
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