Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing

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."

Comments

Re:I smell DRM

[Opportunist]

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?

Just great...

[MojoRilla]

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?

Re:Just great...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Why?

[Renegrade]

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.

Re:I smell DRM

[Stormwatch]

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.

Re:Microsoft and Making Money

[Tapewolf]

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.

Re:Microsoft and Making Money

[peppepz]

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.

Re:EEE

[rtfa-troll]

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.