From vleo@linuxmedialabs.com Wed, 21 Jul 1999 05:23:27 -0600 (MDT) Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 05:23:27 -0600 (MDT) From: Vassili Leonov vleo@linuxmedialabs.com Subject: [Livid-dev] Legal action and other thoughts Hello. We're a little company that is making some video solutions for Linux. DVD is a very interesting market. Unfortunately the DVD Forum approach makes it very diffictult for a small company to enter. The cost of the specs is tremendous, as well as the potential cost of legitation because of very restrictive NDA. So, as being mentioned by Robert Scott Horning, the legal option looks good to me. First, it's perfectly legal :-) Secondly, it's good in terms of publicity for Linux, and whoever associated with the lawsuit. Thirdly, there are chances of winning. These big companies behind DVD are not American companies, so that's a good start. The only problem is to raise money for that. Some non-profit organisation should be set by interested parties. I need to say that music got lucky, since MP3 format become very entranched before big bad guys got involved, so they can scream now, but can't do much. Therefore I'm confident about the future of musical arts in the 21st century. On the other hand movies are in trouble. But keeping in mind the shitty nature of most Hollywood movies shoud we care too much? New format is very easy to develop. In fact there is no need to devleop it - it's called MPEG-2. Take a high capacity disk and put MPEG2 on it. Or you can even put just MJPEG (I hope everybody understands here that MPEG has and advantage of only 3 times over MJPEG), and use uncompressed streo audio at 44KHz. With storage capacities increasing as they are that would not be an issue in 2-3 years. One DVD disk holds about 2GB, so if disks with capacity of 9Gb are available cheaply then there is no need to DVD. Having said that the legal fight against DVD Forum is a great fun and should be persued. Vassili Leonov vleo@linuxmedialabs.com http://linuxmedialabs.com
From roberth@ise-tlx.com Wed, 21 Jul 1999 13:23:42 +0000 Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 13:23:42 +0000 From: Robert Scott Horning roberth@ise-tlx.com Subject: [Livid-dev] Legal action and other thoughts Vassili Leonov wrote: > Hello. > We're a little company that is making some video solutions for Linux. > DVD is a very interesting market. Unfortunately the DVD Forum approach > makes it very diffictult for a small company to enter. The cost of the > specs is tremendous, as well as the potential cost of legitation because > of very restrictive NDA. > > So, as being mentioned by Robert Scott Horning, the legal option looks > good to me. > > First, it's perfectly legal :-) > Secondly, it's good in terms of publicity for Linux, and whoever > associated with the lawsuit. > Thirdly, there are chances of winning. These big companies behind DVD are > not American companies, so that's a good start. > The only problem is to raise money for that. Some non-profit organisation > should be set by interested parties. > > I need to say that music got lucky, since MP3 format become very > entranched before big bad guys got involved, so they can scream now, but > can't do much. Therefore I'm confident about the future of musical arts in > the 21st century. On the other hand movies are in trouble. But keeping in > mind the shitty nature of most Hollywood movies shoud we care too much? > > New format is very easy to develop. In fact there is no need to devleop it > - it's called MPEG-2. Take a high capacity disk and put MPEG2 on it. Or > you can even put just MJPEG (I hope everybody understands here that MPEG > has and advantage of only 3 times over MJPEG), and use uncompressed > streo audio at 44KHz. With storage capacities increasing as they are that > would not be an issue in 2-3 years. One DVD disk holds about 2GB, so if > disks with capacity of 9Gb are available cheaply then there is no need to > DVD. > > Having said that the legal fight against DVD Forum is a great fun and > should be persued. > > Vassili Leonov vleo@linuxmedialabs.com > http://linuxmedialabs.com I admire you on the attitude of trying to go after the legal end of trying to break the DVD Forum's stranglehold on the video spec. This is the tough way to go, and I wish you luck. I, however, beg to differ that MPEG-2 is the proper alternative to DVD-Video. This is because DVD-Video is MPEG-2 with quite a bit of additional overhead to do quite a bit more. The video menu selection alone is quite a bit more than what MPEG-2 does, and you aren't going to have optional Japanese sub-titles in a MPEG-2 video stream without considerable overhead and effort. These are just some of the additional features DVD-Video offers over plain vanilla MPEG-2 A/V multiplexed streams. There is another video format which is more or less in public domain, and that is the VCD format, popular mainly in western Pacific Rim countries (China, Singapore, Taiwan, The Phillipines, Korea, Indonesia, ect.). DVD was actually developed by people who also did work using that format, and there are some characteristics which carried forward. In other words, the new format would be difficult to actually formulate, but there could be some advantages to doing something like that. One thing I've noticed is that most of the people posting in the Linux Video mailing lists seem to be pulling in every direction that I described in my post entitled "What is the status of using DVD-Video specs?" At least there is a forum for trying to do an open source DVD-type project. -- Robert Scott Horning Integrated Systems Engineering 1115 North 200 East Suite 210 Logan, Utah 84341 Phone: (435) 755-5999 FAX: (435) 755-5992 E-mail: roberth@ise-tlx.com