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Apertus, the Open Source HD Movie Camera

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-that's-a-project dept.

osliving writes "This article takes a tour of the hardware and software behind the innovative Apertus, a real world open source project. Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce 'an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment'."

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Open hardware? by V!NCENT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now that there is Ogg, WebM, HTML5 video, the 'Ubuntu' video editor for Gnome and the Kdenlive video editor for KDE4, all HD camera's are still recording to h.264 by default.

    This is a huge problem for free software because it not only involves patents when dealing with h.264, but also a license.

    Now you might think: *yeah well license... bla bla bla bla bla. Free software doesn't concern me.* But if you knew what kind of a threat this poses not only to free software, but also to you; you'd be very, _VERY_ concerned. (unless you wouldn't mind George Orwell scenarios, but in any case you asked what the problem was...)

    You see the license you get with your camera, even expensive proffesional camera's, basically sais; all your base are belong to Mpeg-LA, even when converted to another format. This sucks, but oh well you can alsways buy a different camera because capitalism rules! But in this case it doesn't; try finding HD camera's that do not shoot in h.264 first.

    For more info Google is at your service ;)

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