I sometimes wonder about this with music

Posted Apr 23, 2005 23:46 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: I sometimes wonder about this with music by lakeland
Parent article: Nikon's photo encryption reported broken (News.com)

Why do you think wav is going to be easy forever? Yes, the bulk of the data is raw PCM, but if you don't know how to decipher the header and find the bit-rates, sample size and channels, that's not actually going to help all that much. For that matter, if you don't know that the bulk of the data is raw PCM, you're completely stuck. Wav seems no more or less dependent on our knowledge of the technical details than any other format.

With ogg and flac and other free or open formats, the point is that the details of the format are public, and therefore it will be possible to decipher it fifty years from now, even if it's not easy. With a completely proprietary format that gets abandoned, you have NO CHANCE. The difference between possible-but-maybe-difficult and definitely-impossible is pre-e-e-etty significant in my book.

And why is converting ape to flac hard? I convert shn (semi-free lossless format) to flac all the time, and I would describe the process as trivial.

(Note: "semi-free" is the FSF's term for software that has no-commercial-use clauses in the license, but is free in all other respects.)

Bottom line, this breakthrough means that Nikon camera owners no longer have their own data held ransom to the whims of the Nikon corp. In my book, that's an unqualified good thing.

I sometimes wonder about this with music

Posted Apr 24, 2005 0:15 UTC (Sun) by lakeland (guest, #1157) [Link]

WAV is easy because raw PCM is trivial to detect and then process. Even
without the specs for wav I expect I could decode the file in a couple
hours. Given the specs to OGG I would take _much_ longer, and I wouldn't
be able to do it without the specs.

By APE to flac, I was referring to the rarity of files. Few people have
APEs but those that do are windows-based geeks. Similarly, few people
have FLACs but those that do are linux-based geeks. Even though both
formats are open, the conversion isn't a simple matter of typing ape2flac
(the APE tools are not all open, but the ones relevant here are). In five
years time, coming across a single APE file or FLAC file will be an
oddity, what's the chance of being able to obtain an ape2flac converter
then? Of course, if I were dedicated enough then I could get off my
backside and write ape2flac now.

Now, my reasoning is potentially flawed; I'm inferring based on what has
happened in the past, where better file formats being developed and
leaving the old ones to wither into obscurity. I have virtually no tools
for processing old file formats, and I wouldn't like trying to find them.
However, we now live in a world where everything is just one google away,
and so maybe that will preserve the old knowledge/format spec/source code.