[Gllug] EU council streaming petition

[Russell Howe]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 06:38:22AM +0000, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> A better target for this would be another publically funded body, the 
> BBC.  For one they've already shown the technical will and ability to do 
> this: they made certain live radio streams available as Ogg Vorbis.

Not for a while, unless I'm missing the current location - see
http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/

"Unfortunately the BBC decided not to pursue development and testing of
Ogg Vorbis streaming. There are currently no plans to resume this at a
later date."

As for the thread, WMV/ASF is a poor choice of container format for public
information, and since the CODECs are likely one of the WMV and WMA
family, again a poor choice of encoding IMHO.

Unfortunately, the problem they face is that whilst Ogg, XviD, Speex,
etc are all free, open codecs, they are not installed & available by
default on the vast majority of client devices.

So I can understand their dilemma (if they even got as far as thinking
along these lines):

a) Do we make our content accessible to all, using open formats, but
requiring most users to go and install additional decoding software
(perhaps meaning we have to go and package appropriate software and
distribute it, just to make life easy for the people who don't know/want
to know about digital media formats)?

or b) Do we make the content work for pretty much everyone, even though
it means using what are almost certainly technically inferior encoding
algorithms which are covered by patents held by a company which we're
engaged in litigation with, but with the benefit of our content "just
working" for virtually all of those trying to access it. Even platforms
not officially supported by the vendor of the format can still access
the content thanks to the efforts of others in hacking around the
technical problems?

Saying they can't legally support Linux is (I hope!) just a website
copy-writer misunderstanding the issues involved and choosing poor
wording. I'd like to think I would expect better of the EC, but being
the behemoth bureaucracy that it is, perhaps it's all we can ask for to
even get a statement at all?

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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