Theora is a victim of xiph's own anti-marketing
on
Comparing Codecs for 2004
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The sad truth is that as long as xiph is dominated by stubborn, arrogant technocrats, it will have a pretty hard time.
Ogg-Vorbis is the best audio-codec technically - but everybody calls it "ogg" and not "ogg-vorbis" because the file extension is.ogg
Effectively, xiph does everything possible to sabotage their own product: It doesn't have a good sounding name, it doesn't have a consistent name ("ogg" versus "ogg-vorbis"), they don't have any buttons/banners to put on products on xiph.org and there is lots of confusion about container format (ogg) and codec (vorbis), which is the "U"-part from FUD.
The only reason anybody uses ogg at all is because it is excellent technically and beats all other audio codecs by a longshot.
Unfortunately, the guys at xiph don't acknowledge that fact and insist of wanting to have videos with.ogg extension, too, which is doomed to fail because nobody wants to have audio and video to have the same file extension.
The users have created a pseudo standard file extension of.ogm for XVid/Vorbis streams which does quite well in the P2P-networks (= successful), but Ogg/Theora has the problem that it isn't as mature and even when they mature probably won't be *that* much better than the others. So even if the xiph guys manage to put out a competitive Theora codec, their own confusion and uncertainity (especially their stubborn and idiotic decision to have.ogg for both audio and video) will sabotage any hopes of success, the way I see it.
Which is really unfortunate.
Things would be much better if they would use.ogt or something for ogg/Theora, but the guys at xiph just refuse to:-(
Only one movie is released by one company. If you really like a movie, you don't have a choice between companies--you're stuck with one.
That depends wether you honor the law. If I've learned anything about the Microsoft trials, it's that it's perfectly OK to break the law as long as you don't get caught.
And quite frankly, that's what a lot of people do: They see that their DRM-stuff forces them to watch the stupid anti-piracy trailer every time they want to see the movie, they will have to worry about license servers, they can't copy the stuff to their mp3-player, etc. Just hassles.
As a matter of fact, a pirated copy is not only cheaper, it's also a lot better.
With that kind of reasoning you should also ban tables with sharp 90 corners and replace them with rounded corners.
Just like when you make a mistake and pour your coffee on your groin, you can make a mistake and slip and hit the sharp corner with your head, which can have even more serious consequences (even death if you are unlucky)
is complain to webmasters who haven't heard of it yet.
For example take this, they support Netscape7, but lock out Mozilla and Firefox.
The webmaster did not want to believe me when I told him those browsers are essentially the same (I had a rather lenghty email conversation with him), but he will when he gets enough complaints from enough different people.
The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.
Well, some will do it and put the stuff into P2P-networks.
And if you want to listen to music in your car, downloading it from P2P networks just got a lot more attractive. Because who wants to copy and cut all their CDs over analog audio, when it's so much easier to download the fully converted mp3s from P2P?
If the music industry thinks that hasseling customers will get them more sales, they will find out the hard way how wrong they are.
Actually the DSPs on a typical sound card have a much higher resolution than what was used in making the CD (AFAIK 32 Bits versus 16 Bits, does anybody know for sure?) - the quality loss is neglectible.
That may be why so many Joe Schmoes out there in WWW land like the browser.
Really? Is that so?
I personally think that marketing or the absolute complete lack of it for Mozilla is a bigger reason. Also I've heard Firefox starts much faster than Mozilla in Windows (but here on Linux I couldn't measure any difference in load times using a regular stop watch).
Actually Mozilla was for the most time developed under AOL's supervision and it was supposed to be "for developers and testers only" and it was supposed to be the base for browsers for end users like Netscape. Only after the Mozilla foundation was founded, they were really "allowed" to do end-user marketing. Yeah, and of course "Firefox" sounds much better than "Mozilla", which suffers from the "I don't know how to spell it"-disease.
Joe Schmoe also uses MS Word, which has probably 20 times the features of Mozilla. There is absolutely no hint that anybody gets turned off by features in the configuration - if they don't understand them, they just keep the defaults, no harm done.
Firefox feels a little too much "dumbed down" for me.
An example is that I coulnd't find a preference in Firefox to turn off gif-animations (v0.9 IIRC). Yes, I'm pretty sure there is some way through extensions or about:config, but what's the point, it's the same browser engine anyway.
Your comment is not just funny, it's also pretty insightful. Their recent moves (for example Licensing6.0) all point to a short-term strategy to get as much money as possible out of Windows before it gets marginalized by Linux.
There's a difficult concept to grasp here. You actually have to wait until the OS is booted and the firewall is enabled and _then_ plug the cable in.
The real tragedy is that you never see these horrible workarounds in Microsoft's TCO studies.
And BTW, I haven't seen "please put the ethernet cable not into the computer unless it's fully booted" anywhere in Windows XP's documentation, so where are you supposed to know this kind of stuff?
reduced downtime and administration with using a Mac
Laughable, if anything breaks in your precious Mac, it will be send-in-wait-for-at-least-2-weeks time, for any PC I can get any spare part within 30 minutes (during business hours of course).
That's the MAIN reason I will NEVER even consider a closed single-vendor platform for anything mission critical.
Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless!
What you can do is put a tiny Firefox button on your website, preferrably shown only to IE-users.
Sure, a single banner impression won't make anybody switch browsers, but when users see Firefox buttons on many different websites, they will sooner or later check it out.
Oh, come on. Don't be such a zealot. Lets get real. How hard is it for a vendor to install linux?
Maybe you should stop being a zealot.
Facts:
For a vendor, it's equally hard to install Freedos and to install Linux
A halfway complete Linux distribution is much more useful than Freedos because it includes office suite, IM, media player, etc. Actually out of the box it beats Windows easily as well. So if you are not into games and also don't need other Windows-only software, Linux doesn't looks very good.
FreeDOS on the other hand offers zero value to customers
All PC-makers that don't have ties with Microsoft and want to install a free (beer) OS, install Linux, never FreeDOS. An example is Thailand's ICT PCs
I'm really getting sick of companies that "send out letters" to the Linux community, but don't support Linux for their products.
Even with all the existing GPL-software for Palm devices on Linux, Palm doesn't include it on the CD-ROM they ship with the devices, they don't list Linux as supported operating system and needless to say, they will tell you to go away when you have a problem synching with Linux.
On Windows there is no system and all the packaging systems on Linux are a lot better than that. - There is absolutely no problem in having an installer in Linux that works on all Linux distributions. (And actually for example skype is offering packages that work on all Linux distros, as an example.) So the whole packaging system is an additional bonus, nobody is forced to use it, neither the users nor the creators of software.
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Ogg-Vorbis is the best audio-codec technically - but everybody calls it "ogg" and not "ogg-vorbis" because the file extension is .ogg
Effectively, xiph does everything possible to sabotage their own product: It doesn't have a good sounding name, it doesn't have a consistent name ("ogg" versus "ogg-vorbis"), they don't have any buttons/banners to put on products on xiph.org and there is lots of confusion about container format (ogg) and codec (vorbis), which is the "U"-part from FUD.
The only reason anybody uses ogg at all is because it is excellent technically and beats all other audio codecs by a longshot.
Unfortunately, the guys at xiph don't acknowledge that fact and insist of wanting to have videos with .ogg extension, too, which is doomed to fail because nobody wants to have audio and video to have the same file extension.
The users have created a pseudo standard file extension of .ogm for XVid/Vorbis streams which does quite well in the P2P-networks (= successful), but Ogg/Theora has the problem that it isn't as mature and even when they mature probably won't be *that* much better than the others. So even if the xiph guys manage to put out a competitive Theora codec, their own confusion and uncertainity (especially their stubborn and idiotic decision to have .ogg for both audio and video) will sabotage any hopes of success, the way I see it.
Which is really unfortunate.
Things would be much better if they would use .ogt or something for ogg/Theora, but the guys at xiph just refuse to :-(
But please add PCI-slots.
That depends wether you honor the law. If I've learned anything about the Microsoft trials, it's that it's perfectly OK to break the law as long as you don't get caught.
And quite frankly, that's what a lot of people do: They see that their DRM-stuff forces them to watch the stupid anti-piracy trailer every time they want to see the movie, they will have to worry about license servers, they can't copy the stuff to their mp3-player, etc. Just hassles.
As a matter of fact, a pirated copy is not only cheaper, it's also a lot better.
Just like when you make a mistake and pour your coffee on your groin, you can make a mistake and slip and hit the sharp corner with your head, which can have even more serious consequences (even death if you are unlucky)
In Windows/WMP it worked in a window fine, but skipped in fullscreen.
I guess the VIA will be roughly comparable, so it should be able to handle it (at least under Linux, so I guess you are right with the WMP-comment)
The Gnome-HIG and especially their new dialogs are just a pain.
Don't tell me, tell him.
For example take this, they support Netscape7, but lock out Mozilla and Firefox.
The webmaster did not want to believe me when I told him those browsers are essentially the same (I had a rather lenghty email conversation with him), but he will when he gets enough complaints from enough different people.
Well, some will do it and put the stuff into P2P-networks.
And if you want to listen to music in your car, downloading it from P2P networks just got a lot more attractive. Because who wants to copy and cut all their CDs over analog audio, when it's so much easier to download the fully converted mp3s from P2P?
If the music industry thinks that hasseling customers will get them more sales, they will find out the hard way how wrong they are.
Really? Is that so?
I personally think that marketing or the absolute complete lack of it for Mozilla is a bigger reason. Also I've heard Firefox starts much faster than Mozilla in Windows (but here on Linux I couldn't measure any difference in load times using a regular stop watch).
Actually Mozilla was for the most time developed under AOL's supervision and it was supposed to be "for developers and testers only" and it was supposed to be the base for browsers for end users like Netscape. Only after the Mozilla foundation was founded, they were really "allowed" to do end-user marketing. Yeah, and of course "Firefox" sounds much better than "Mozilla", which suffers from the "I don't know how to spell it"-disease.
Joe Schmoe also uses MS Word, which has probably 20 times the features of Mozilla. There is absolutely no hint that anybody gets turned off by features in the configuration - if they don't understand them, they just keep the defaults, no harm done.
Exactly.
Firefox feels a little too much "dumbed down" for me.
An example is that I coulnd't find a preference in Firefox to turn off gif-animations (v0.9 IIRC). Yes, I'm pretty sure there is some way through extensions or about:config, but what's the point, it's the same browser engine anyway.
Your comment is not just funny, it's also pretty insightful. Their recent moves (for example Licensing6.0) all point to a short-term strategy to get as much money as possible out of Windows before it gets marginalized by Linux.
The real tragedy is that you never see these horrible workarounds in Microsoft's TCO studies.
And BTW, I haven't seen "please put the ethernet cable not into the computer unless it's fully booted" anywhere in Windows XP's documentation, so where are you supposed to know this kind of stuff?
How many of these exploits work with active scripting and activeX turned off? Not many.
How many of these exploits work with Firefox with scripting enabled? Even less than that.
Didn't Apple stop shipping IE, as soon as Safari was finished?
Also not every PC runs Windows.
Laughable, if anything breaks in your precious Mac, it will be send-in-wait-for-at-least-2-weeks time, for any PC I can get any spare part within 30 minutes (during business hours of course).
That's the MAIN reason I will NEVER even consider a closed single-vendor platform for anything mission critical.
What you can do is put a tiny Firefox button on your website, preferrably shown only to IE-users.
Sure, a single banner impression won't make anybody switch browsers, but when users see Firefox buttons on many different websites, they will sooner or later check it out.
Maybe you should stop being a zealot.
Facts:
The Mozilla foundation distributes only on servers outside the USA.
Even with all the existing GPL-software for Palm devices on Linux, Palm doesn't include it on the CD-ROM they ship with the devices, they don't list Linux as supported operating system and needless to say, they will tell you to go away when you have a problem synching with Linux.
It's the actions that count, not the words.
So in both senses, it makes him look pretty dumb.
Completely wrong, Apache was at roughly 50% 5 years ago and is now at roughly 70%
On Windows there is no system and all the packaging systems on Linux are a lot better than that. - There is absolutely no problem in having an installer in Linux that works on all Linux distributions. (And actually for example skype is offering packages that work on all Linux distros, as an example.) So the whole packaging system is an additional bonus, nobody is forced to use it, neither the users nor the creators of software.