I'm not familiar with encoding hardware for any codec. All the encoding I've ever done was with mencoder, in software. It seems there should be one soon, though.
GIF, JPEG, and MPEG1 expired and we still use them.
GIF isn't used all that much. Its compression is inferior to PNG, and it only supports 8 bit color, which looks very unimpressive. Also animations are a lot less common these days.
JPEG I'll grant you that. But with still images it's easy to afford being suboptimal. Bandwidth increased, but there's not that much need in adding more images to a website. With video, the much increased resolution means that a better algorithm makes a most noticeable difference.
MPEG1 remains pretty much exclusively for legacy use. Nobody sane is streaming that from their website, because a better codec can save so much bandwidth.
I listen to music at 12 kbit/s. Sounds a bit like AM Radio, but that is fine with me. If you want CD quality you can get it at 48k using MPEG's AACplus format.
48k is not CD quality in any case because it's lossy compression that will always miss something from the CD. Sure it can be good, but it's not original.
NO open source can do that because open source (codecs) are almost always a generation behind what the pros are doing. So why the hell would I choose an inferior codec??? I'm not a zealot or religious.
WebM isn't something made by a couple guys in a garage. It's based on VP8, a commercial product made by a company Google acquired, which was later relicensed. It's just as "pro" as any other codec, unless you're going to argue a license change somehow magically affects the quality.
People who care about legality and not getting sued?
Royalties may be owed for distributing encoders, decoders, and videos. If you do end up owing the MPEG LA something, it seems to have a lower bound of USD $25,000.
It seems for instance Mozilla would definitely have to pay a license. Now Mozilla probably has the funding for it, but does that cover customized versions shipped by Linux distributions? I have no clue, and with enough downloads the price gets in the millions of USD.
They do promise not to charge for internet video, but ad supported video probably doesn't count. So if you try to earn a bit of cash from your cat video with 100001 impressions, you'll be looking at ~$100 from your advertiser, and a $25K bill from MPEG LA.
Overall if the MPEG LA does want something from you, the absolute smallest amount they could want is a huge deal for a normal person or a small organization.
That seems like an unwise thing to ignore.
Besides, the costs for switching to WebM are small. Software is easy to update, and nearly all players are upgradeable as well, but there the problem is much lesser because you're already paying for the player and the content.
Because the Free software model restricts methods of making money. It can be done but you need to find a business model that will work. And often it will consist of making Powerful yet Hard to use products.
This doesn't apply in this case. I wasn't speaking of the world in general, but this specific case we're discussing. Why is there any need for some middle ground when there is such a favourable choice?
WebM and Theora don't need to be paid for, they're already done. And why would anybody but the makers want there to be some sort of payment? The terms certainly don't stop you from encoding anything you want and selling it, or including the encoder or decoder anywhere you want.
Your "middle ground" basically amounts to paying money where there's absolutely no need to. That's just bad capitalism.
I am sure many of you have/want jobs where you can code and play with cool stuff and get paid so you can eat and have a family. Well where is that money going to come from? Donations may work to support a single developer, for a good product. Consulting works for some products. Or you need a big company who is using it just to one up everyone else. But in reality they need to make money to improve their product, and maintain it.
I'm sorry, but I actually earn my money writing GPL licensed code. No donations, commercial product.
Not a one time fluke even, I've done it before.
Though none of that has anything to do with the question of WebM vs H.264.
By the time the patents expire, they won't matter anymore. We'll be using another codec, optimized for 3D, or whatever.
Eventually even patented stuff becomes free, so why choose an inferior Theora or other OSS Codec that sounds like "shit" at 12 kbit/s when I can use the soon-to-be public domain AACplusSBR codec that sounds great?
You don't even know what you're talking about.
First, 12 kbit/s is a tiny bandwidth. Any codec sounds like shit at that bitrate, and it's the sort of thing that gets used maybe for cell phone audio. Nobody's squeezing video into that. The bare minimum for music is about 10X that.
Second, a good codec would be able to obtain good quality in a small bitrate. That is, if Theora could encode watchable video at 12 kbit/s it'd be freaking amazing, on the level of breaching the speed of light. Theora's problem is exactly the reverse, that good quality takes a higher bitrate than H.264 to attain.
Third, WebM has a nearly identical quality to H264. So there's no reason to go with an unnecessarily restricted codec.
Following that definition literally would be very weird.
I don't think "promoting fraternity" and "reducing standing armies" are automatically good things. Promoting fraternity could be putting down a revolt against a tyrannic government, and reducing armies could come as a result of aggression.
For instance, should Truman have got one for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? After all it did force Japan to stop their military actions, and reduced in the imposition of the war renunciation clause.
I agree that Obama shouldn't have been nominated for the reasons you said.
But it seems like a difficult prize to award. People who do this sort of thing are rare.
There are many people who were more deserving of it than him -- heroes, scientists, doctors, philanthropists, lots of folks who have done much more good. They were all passed up. That's the point.
A. Free forever, no matter what B. Free unless I happen something to infringe on something in 97K of text.
Why would I be crazy enough to go with B? The terms are updated every 5 years, so there's little guarantee that something that isn't a problem now won't be a problem later.
I'm not saying make your life's mission. But IMO people ought to be consistent.
Say, for instance. I don't like cigarette smoke. But since there exists such a thing as a non-smoking restaurant, I don't sit in in a smoky restaurant wishing the air were clean. I looked around, found the one non-smoking restaurant, and regularly went there. It didn't require me to take on a lifelong advocacy project or anything like that.
No, I mean what's the point of wishing they were more developer friendly?
The way I see it, if you want something to happen, you've got two choices. You can contribute towards it yourself, or you can do something to convince third parties to align themselves with your interest.
So, if you really want Apple to be more developer friendly, you should be either taking direct actions towards that goal (probably not possible), or not buying their stuff until they become more developer friendly (while making it clear that it's the reason you're not buying)
Just wishing it doesn't do anything useful. If you don't do it, and nobody else has a reason to do it, you'll just keep wishing forever.
So, for instance, I'm of the same "they should be more developer friendly" persuasion. As a result, I won't purchase an Apple product until they actually become more developer friendly. I don't care what they make and how shiny it is -- I still won't buy it. Because I really do want that developer friendliness.
The N900 is most developer friendly and I did buy it.
It's written "principles", and if you're not willing to stick to them, you don't really have them.
The whole point of morality is overriding practical issues. If stealing goes against your morality, then you don't even when you could use the money and have something to steal within easy reach.
So you should pick one: either you don't really think Apple is evil, or you shouldn't buy their products.
The awesome thing about Git is that everybody who checked out those repositories has a complete copy with all the revisions, and can exchange commits with the others.
So it should be really easy for somebody to recreate a public repository somewhere else. Anybody got a link?
Your theory sounds nice, but that's all it is, and you most certainly can't prove the slightest bit of it. For example, you mention the highly secular population in Europe and use that as evidence, but fail to explain why the USA has not followed the same model. In fact religiosity has remained largely constant, and you can't hope to show that all americans are highly ignorant.
I'm not sure why it's taking longer in the US, but it's still happening.
Nor does your model fit when eastern countries unaffected by events in the west that took a much different In some, atheism was the rule, rather than the exception, long before people had answers to to the questions of their daily existence. In other countries, the dominant beliefs were religious, yet did not offer the answers you refer to. by all means, try to explain these holes in your theory, without assuming they are insignificant and irrelevant.
Assuming from the outset (as you seem to) that all religion is inherently false, there is one segment of society that morality and the afterlife as portrayed by most religions help keep in check: sociopaths.
Heh. You're forgetting that the US is the place where CEOs seem to near universally have a policy of doing whatever it takes to make money. Even here I often see posters saying that "fiduciary duty to maximize profit". A study mentioned that businessmen and sociopaths seem quite alike.
All of that goes most directly against some major tenets of Christianity. If religion were a successful influence in this regard, business there should be quite different than it is.
Besides, nobody takes the "God is watching" stuff seriously. Remember, everybody is a sinner in any case, and all you can ask for is forgiveness. So it's not a problem at all to sleep with your wife, he's just got to make a visit to the church afterwards.
Now assume that one of the religions is correct (or portions of some of them), and an extra use arises: passing along actual truth. Considering that believers of religions believe this last one to be true, then this use-case will remain as long as the religions themselves remain.
There can't be that much of it. In my view, religion works by first retarding, then finally quietly incoroporating social progress.
See what happened with slavery for instance. The Bible has plenty to justify it, so initially people used that as support for their position. Now it's gone, and you'll never see anybody seriously argue that they ought to be able to own a slave, though the Bible is still unchanged.
In 50-100 years the world will have near-universal gay marriage, and religion will come up with some convoluted way to explain why it's a perfectly good thing despite the previous opposition to it.
So what remains after ignoring all the things like support for slavery and opposition to gay marriage? "Love your neighbour"? It seems to me that's far too little truth attached to oodles of falsehood.
Religion persists only because people have an use for it. But that's steadily disappearing.
One of the main things about it is that it's an explanation for the unexplainable. For instance, before we knew what lightning and the Sun were, those were "explained" by religion. Now we know what they are, and that part of religion became obsolete.
Currently some of the main things people seem to cling to is healing, morality and the afterlife. Healing will go away eventually, as medicine gets to the point where we can heal pretty much anything. Morality will take some effort, but the Catholic church seems to be making a very good demonstration of how their priests aren't especially moral. For the afterlife, we'll probably be able to live eternally if we want to eventually.
Over time, things like that should result in it fading until it becomes inexistent or barely so, as it has less and less relevance to people's lives. The effect is already seen in Europe, where in many countries a large percentage is not religious, and antiquated religious policies are being beaten back. For instance Spain introduced gay marriage in 2005 and is progressive in other respects like allowing transsexuals to serve in the army.
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I'm not familiar with encoding hardware for any codec. All the encoding I've ever done was with mencoder, in software. It seems there should be one soon, though.
For decoding, Broadcom has a chip for instance.
Venus, with its temperature above 400ÂC fails the "liquid water could exist on a planet's surface" requirement.
GIF isn't used all that much. Its compression is inferior to PNG, and it only supports 8 bit color, which looks very unimpressive. Also animations are a lot less common these days.
JPEG I'll grant you that. But with still images it's easy to afford being suboptimal. Bandwidth increased, but there's not that much need in adding more images to a website. With video, the much increased resolution means that a better algorithm makes a most noticeable difference.
MPEG1 remains pretty much exclusively for legacy use. Nobody sane is streaming that from their website, because a better codec can save so much bandwidth.
48k is not CD quality in any case because it's lossy compression that will always miss something from the CD. Sure it can be good, but it's not original.
WebM isn't something made by a couple guys in a garage. It's based on VP8, a commercial product made by a company Google acquired, which was later relicensed. It's just as "pro" as any other codec, unless you're going to argue a license change somehow magically affects the quality.
And the quality is quite good
People who care about legality and not getting sued?
Royalties may be owed for distributing encoders, decoders, and videos. If you do end up owing the MPEG LA something, it seems to have a lower bound of USD $25,000.
It seems for instance Mozilla would definitely have to pay a license. Now Mozilla probably has the funding for it, but does that cover customized versions shipped by Linux distributions? I have no clue, and with enough downloads the price gets in the millions of USD.
They do promise not to charge for internet video, but ad supported video probably doesn't count. So if you try to earn a bit of cash from your cat video with 100001 impressions, you'll be looking at ~$100 from your advertiser, and a $25K bill from MPEG LA.
Overall if the MPEG LA does want something from you, the absolute smallest amount they could want is a huge deal for a normal person or a small organization.
That seems like an unwise thing to ignore.
Besides, the costs for switching to WebM are small. Software is easy to update, and nearly all players are upgradeable as well, but there the problem is much lesser because you're already paying for the player and the content.
This doesn't apply in this case. I wasn't speaking of the world in general, but this specific case we're discussing. Why is there any need for some middle ground when there is such a favourable choice?
WebM and Theora don't need to be paid for, they're already done. And why would anybody but the makers want there to be some sort of payment? The terms certainly don't stop you from encoding anything you want and selling it, or including the encoder or decoder anywhere you want.
Your "middle ground" basically amounts to paying money where there's absolutely no need to. That's just bad capitalism.
I'm sorry, but I actually earn my money writing GPL licensed code. No donations, commercial product.
Not a one time fluke even, I've done it before.
Though none of that has anything to do with the question of WebM vs H.264.
So then peacemakers are rare after all?
So where's your list?
Completely serious question. I do agree Obama was the wrong choice. So who would you have chosen instead?
By the time the patents expire, they won't matter anymore. We'll be using another codec, optimized for 3D, or whatever.
You don't even know what you're talking about.
First, 12 kbit/s is a tiny bandwidth. Any codec sounds like shit at that bitrate, and it's the sort of thing that gets used maybe for cell phone audio. Nobody's squeezing video into that. The bare minimum for music is about 10X that.
Second, a good codec would be able to obtain good quality in a small bitrate. That is, if Theora could encode watchable video at 12 kbit/s it'd be freaking amazing, on the level of breaching the speed of light. Theora's problem is exactly the reverse, that good quality takes a higher bitrate than H.264 to attain.
Third, WebM has a nearly identical quality to H264. So there's no reason to go with an unnecessarily restricted codec.
Following that definition literally would be very weird.
I don't think "promoting fraternity" and "reducing standing armies" are automatically good things. Promoting fraternity could be putting down a revolt against a tyrannic government, and reducing armies could come as a result of aggression.
For instance, should Truman have got one for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? After all it did force Japan to stop their military actions, and reduced in the imposition of the war renunciation clause.
I agree that Obama shouldn't have been nominated for the reasons you said.
But it seems like a difficult prize to award. People who do this sort of thing are rare.
Got a list?
What need is there for the middle ground?
First, the terms aren't simple at all. Go ahead, read that, and tell me you really know what that says.
Second, when faced with a choice of:
A. Free forever, no matter what
B. Free unless I happen something to infringe on something in 97K of text.
Why would I be crazy enough to go with B? The terms are updated every 5 years, so there's little guarantee that something that isn't a problem now won't be a problem later.
Bring food from home and eat at work/park/other smoke-free location
Been long out of it, doing fine so far.
I'm not saying make your life's mission. But IMO people ought to be consistent.
Say, for instance. I don't like cigarette smoke. But since there exists such a thing as a non-smoking restaurant, I don't sit in in a smoky restaurant wishing the air were clean. I looked around, found the one non-smoking restaurant, and regularly went there. It didn't require me to take on a lifelong advocacy project or anything like that.
No, I mean what's the point of wishing they were more developer friendly?
The way I see it, if you want something to happen, you've got two choices. You can contribute towards it yourself, or you can do something to convince third parties to align themselves with your interest.
So, if you really want Apple to be more developer friendly, you should be either taking direct actions towards that goal (probably not possible), or not buying their stuff until they become more developer friendly (while making it clear that it's the reason you're not buying)
Just wishing it doesn't do anything useful. If you don't do it, and nobody else has a reason to do it, you'll just keep wishing forever.
So, for instance, I'm of the same "they should be more developer friendly" persuasion. As a result, I won't purchase an Apple product until they actually become more developer friendly. I don't care what they make and how shiny it is -- I still won't buy it. Because I really do want that developer friendliness.
The N900 is most developer friendly and I did buy it.
And what is that wish good for? Why would they care about what you want if you're going to buy their stuff anyway?
It's written "principles", and if you're not willing to stick to them, you don't really have them.
The whole point of morality is overriding practical issues. If stealing goes against your morality, then you don't even when you could use the money and have something to steal within easy reach.
So you should pick one: either you don't really think Apple is evil, or you shouldn't buy their products.
It didn't go unnoticed though. I avoided VIA chipsets like the plague, and so did a lot of people.
Yeah, funny how there are so many to choose from, though.
The awesome thing about Git is that everybody who checked out those repositories has a complete copy with all the revisions, and can exchange commits with the others.
So it should be really easy for somebody to recreate a public repository somewhere else. Anybody got a link?
True, but the darkness gets pushed further and further away into obscure matters that most people care very little about.
Religion has its foothold in things related to the life of normal people, not in the holes of the knowledge of particle physics.
Actually, no, religion in the US is decreasing as well.
I'm not sure why it's taking longer in the US, but it's still happening.
That's rather too vague. Be more specific please.
Heh. You're forgetting that the US is the place where CEOs seem to near universally have a policy of doing whatever it takes to make money. Even here I often see posters saying that "fiduciary duty to maximize profit". A study mentioned that businessmen and sociopaths seem quite alike.
All of that goes most directly against some major tenets of Christianity. If religion were a successful influence in this regard, business there should be quite different than it is.
Besides, nobody takes the "God is watching" stuff seriously. Remember, everybody is a sinner in any case, and all you can ask for is forgiveness. So it's not a problem at all to sleep with your wife, he's just got to make a visit to the church afterwards.
There can't be that much of it. In my view, religion works by first retarding, then finally quietly incoroporating social progress.
See what happened with slavery for instance. The Bible has plenty to justify it, so initially people used that as support for their position. Now it's gone, and you'll never see anybody seriously argue that they ought to be able to own a slave, though the Bible is still unchanged.
In 50-100 years the world will have near-universal gay marriage, and religion will come up with some convoluted way to explain why it's a perfectly good thing despite the previous opposition to it.
So what remains after ignoring all the things like support for slavery and opposition to gay marriage? "Love your neighbour"? It seems to me that's far too little truth attached to oodles of falsehood.
Religion persists only because people have an use for it. But that's steadily disappearing.
One of the main things about it is that it's an explanation for the unexplainable. For instance, before we knew what lightning and the Sun were, those were "explained" by religion. Now we know what they are, and that part of religion became obsolete.
Currently some of the main things people seem to cling to is healing, morality and the afterlife. Healing will go away eventually, as medicine gets to the point where we can heal pretty much anything. Morality will take some effort, but the Catholic church seems to be making a very good demonstration of how their priests aren't especially moral. For the afterlife, we'll probably be able to live eternally if we want to eventually.
Over time, things like that should result in it fading until it becomes inexistent or barely so, as it has less and less relevance to people's lives. The effect is already seen in Europe, where in many countries a large percentage is not religious, and antiquated religious policies are being beaten back. For instance Spain introduced gay marriage in 2005 and is progressive in other respects like allowing transsexuals to serve in the army.
Getting over it is exactly the wrong thing to do. Where's your pride? You're going to let a bunch of bureacrats decide what you can and can't read?