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Apertus, the Open Source HD Movie Camera
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'."
Last time I checked, .mov was a container, not a CODEC.
A .mov file can use a lot of things. Quicktime 7 gives me PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, DV, DVCPro, Apple Pixlet, MPEG-4 and H.264 as video CODEC options. Older Quicktime versions would have offered me older CODECs too.
And what's JP4? Never heard of it. I sure hope they don't mean their camera runs on jet fuel.
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 ;)
Here be signatures
Reading through the article, I'm loving just about everything about this camera, except the most important part of all...the sensor, which is absolutely tiny. Forget about a camera for cinema, with a sensor that size you're going to be struggling to get it not to look like a webcam video. Looking at the company that makes the actual camera element, though, it looks like they also sell a model with a more reasonably sized sensor, but it can only do 5fps. If they really want to pass this thing off as a motion picture camera, they need to find a solution that will give them a big sensor at a respectable frame rate. Hopefully that will be possible in the near future, because the rest of this project looks downright awesome.
> So not open source = George Orwell? Are you really that much of a blind zealot?
When you play with someone else's ball, they get to dictate terms.
You don't have to be a "zealot" to understand this. HELL, the film industry fled the East coast over this very nonsense.
That is why there is a Hollywood to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think you are wrong. In "GENERAL TALKING PICTURES CORP. V. WESTERN ELEC. CO., 304 U. S. 175 (1938)" the SCOTUS found that a patent holder CAN authorize a manufacturer to only manufacture for a particular market (home use vs commercial), and that any subsequent purchasers only get the same authorization that the manufacturer had. For example, if MPEG-LA authorized Canon to use MPEG patents in consumer cameras only, and you bought one of those cameras and used it for commercial use, you are infringing the patent.