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Codecs cause Fedora pain
When an article titled Codec Buddy in Fedora
8 was posted to LWN earlier this week it generated quite a bit
comment... 33 comments posted as of this writing. The LWN thread caused
another long string of comments, this time
on the Fedora
advisory board mailing list, in which proprietary software is compared
to heroin. Seth Vidal says in the initial posting: "I don't care
about needles and I don't want to ween the addicts off."
Codecs remain a sticky issue because they are patent encumbered. Windows users are used to paying for an operating system, and often codec licensing is included in the cost. When they download an MP3 file they expect it to play. On Linux systems in the United States, and anywhere else that recognizes the codec patents, MP3s don't play and it makes users very grumpy. Codec Buddy attempts to educate Fedora users about the patent encumbered nature of codecs and then allows the user to pay for license through Fluendo, a company located in Barcelona, Spain. According to a Fluendo press release: "The Fluendo codecs plug directly into the popular and widely used GStreamer multimedia framework available on all the major GNU/Linux and Solaris systems. Users of GNU/Linux and Solaris operating systems have previously lacked solutions which enabled them to license and use popular media formats such as Windows Media, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 in accordance with the laws of their country. Through Fluendo's agreements with Microsoft and MPEG LA such a solution is now available." The Fedora advisory board has since been updated with some relevant conclusions. Support for current iPod devices can be provided by Fedora - getting around Apple's obfuscation is not seen as a DMCA violation. The rules on linking to encumbered software have also been loosened: "This means that we can put a page up on the fedoraproject.org wiki, which carefully explains that there is an optional addon repository called Livna, which contains packages that for a variety of reasons, are not included in the normal Fedora repositories. We should not specify these reasons, and if someone asserted their patents against something in Livna, we would need to take the page down." Multimedia is important to providing a popular desktop. For many users it is the most important part of the desktop. A Linux desktop will not become wildly popular until it becomes easy to share music and videos with friends. Education is great, teaching people about the values of freedom with respect to software is a worthy goal. Not everyone wants to learn that lesson, especially when they already have gigabytes of music in MP3 format. Your editor has over 100 gigabytes of music in flac format (thanks to LWN editor Forrest Cook) and 0 MP3s. Unfortunately there aren't many devices that will play flac files. Salespeople in stores that sell iPods and the like have no idea what a flac is, and don't care in my experience. There's a long road ahead until free formats are more popular than the formats that are currently more readily available. (Log in to post comments)
Flacs on "the like" Posted Nov 8, 2007 7:40 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Perhaps this is way, way off-topic, but a Sandisk e250, e260, etc. can have RockBox installed on it, and then will happily play flac files (and tetris, at the same time). I recently spotted an e280 (8G flash) at an OfficeMax for US$130.
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 8, 2007 8:42 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] For portable devices, I'd suggest looking at Trekstor Vibez (12GB), iAudio 7 (16GB to-come) or the larger iAudio X5 devices (60GB) for FLAC playing support. Naturally one of the devices supported by Rockbox is ok too, though I'd rather support a manufacturer that supports free codecs out-of-the-box (same thing why I don't endorse Nokia's tablet devices in the area of multimedia).
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 8, 2007 11:22 UTC (Thu) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link] You probably want to transcode flac files to something like ogg in any case for a portable device. Because flac files are relatively big, they don't cache so well on the player, which means it is accessing its storage more often, which reduces the battery life.
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 8, 2007 19:10 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] Why does caching matter? I would've thought that music data is usually streamed once through the processor and then not reused soon enough for caching to help.
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 8, 2007 22:23 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] For a hard disk device, think read-ahead caching. But even without that, you just have to hit the disk a lot more for each minute of flac music. I rip all my music to flac, and then convert a subset to ogg for portable use.
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:58 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Indeed. Also there's repeat modes (repeat-this-track and A/B repeating often use short enough spans to be entirely in RAM with Ogg) and users asking for short rewinds and so on. All my CD music is stored in FLAC as its primary form (it lets me compact the huge CD pile down to a fairly small stack, which fits on a small hard drive these days), but is converted to Ogg for portable use. This turns a 250Gb lump, far larger than any player, to a 25Gb lump which fits on even a small hard drive based player such as a 30Gb ipod. I *really* don't want to have to play chop-and-change with my music collection, ever. The whole lot should be on the portable device.
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:09 UTC (Thu) by pljohnson3 (guest, #3749) [Link] There is also the Meizu (Dane-elec) players. I have used both the iAudio (broken headphone output) and the Dane-elec for both ogg vorbis and flac. I like both. Disappointed in the iAudio quality. Agree with native support being required. Phil
Devices playing FLAC Posted Nov 9, 2007 9:38 UTC (Fri) by PaulDickson (subscriber, #478) [Link] The CoWon D2 supports FLAC (Vorbis as well).
WTH is wrong with public perception Posted Nov 8, 2007 11:23 UTC (Thu) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link] I am an FFmpeg/MPlayer developer and articles like this one frustrate me to no end. Hearing - again and again - that codec support, MP3 support even, is a problem for free software is a disgrace and flies right in the face of all the hard work we have been doing over the years. There has been free software support for MP3 basically from day 1 and nowadays we support almost all common codecs natively (RealVideo 3.0/4.0 will be available by the end of the year). In particular, everything that Fluendo has for sale is available in free as in speech and beer implementations from both FFmpeg and different alternative sources. We support more samples than the Fluendo stuff plus we are faster. I can understand that some (US-based) distros are in a legal bind when it comes to software patents even though IMO they could handle the situation differently. What I cannot understand is that supposedly clueful people like LWN editors write articles that make it sound as if free software codec support did not exist. The opposite is the case. There are no technical problems, all the obstacles are legal and/or legal FUD. Note that Windows users don't have this problem. They just download the second most popular free software application - VLC media player - and enjoy free software multimedia. Nobody seems to run around warning them of the grave danger they are exposing themselves to...
WTH is wrong with public perception Posted Nov 8, 2007 15:51 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] What I cannot understand is that supposedly clueful people like LWN editors write articles that make it sound as if free software codec support did not exist.No, that's not what the article says at all. It says that there aren't legally available[1] means of playing encumbered codecs that don't involve licensing the format, not that there aren't free software solutions. Please don't try and link together the two concepts. They're unrelated. [1] Yes, I'm well aware that in some juristictions, that's not true. But Fedora is distributed worldwide, and that means they can't afford to take the risk that they'll be sued in, say, the USA, just because the software they're distributing (or even just linking to) happens to be legal in some parts of Europe.
WTH is wrong with public perception Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] By this rationale they should be avoiding shipping openssl and all that depends upon it, including openssh. In some jurisdictions using encryption is a very serious crime. The real reason ffmpeg isn't available for non-patent-encumbered jurisdictions is that the US is a patent-encumbered one and the majority of Fedora devs (in the US) reasonably don't see the point in adding infrastructure for the other jurisdictions that they can't use. (also it can sometimes be hard to figure out what those jurisdictions are, not least thanks to the EU's ridiculously obfuscatory approach to lawmaking.)
WTH is wrong with public perception Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:44 UTC (Thu) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link] I'm not linking the two concepts, I'm complaining that the article muddies the distinction! The problem is *not* a technical one, it is a political decision made by some distributions, most notably Fedora / Red Hat. Quoting from the article: On Linux systems in the United States, and anywhere else that recognizes the codec patents, MP3s don't play and it makes users very grumpy. This is obviously total nonsense. MP3s play perfectly, it's just that some distros based in the USA shy away from including MP3 decoders. Plus, end-users have never been in any kind of legal risk! This gets misrepresented all the time.
Codecs cause Fedora pain Posted Nov 8, 2007 13:01 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] >Unfortunately their aren't many devices that will play flac files. Salespeople in stores that sell iPods and the like have no idea what a flac is, and don't care in my experience. Ignorance is bliss!
Education Posted Nov 8, 2007 18:21 UTC (Thu) by sdoyon (subscriber, #4221) [Link] I think education is an important aspect here, and so I might perhaps buy the idea because of the great opportunity to explain the situation. But now if "We should not specify these reasons" (why packages from Livna are not in Fedora), how can they really explain anything? How can they fully explain the situation while pretending not to be aware of any patent claims?
Codecs cause Fedora pain Posted Nov 8, 2007 22:09 UTC (Thu) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] There's an error in the article, it should read: "On Linux systems in the United States, and anywhere else that uses mainstream distros, MP3s don't play out-of-the-box and it makes users very grumpy." I *hate* that too. My girlfriend installed an Ubuntu today, and even with codec-buddy-like solutions playing these formats is akward. She has to choose in a list of plugins, guessing what she needs, and install non-free stuff just because of a stupid law in a remote country. I'm grumpy.
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