Lacking support for open media formats [LWN.net]

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 8, 2007 18:20 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
Parent article: Nokia N800 announced

Too bad Nokia's approach is (looking at the specs and first comments from the users) still not to support open media formats like Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora. They have apparently deliberately removed support for those from GStreamer,

I'd like to them to actually stand behind open standards, even if it's in the patent-problematic field of media formats. So nothing spectacular to see here, considering also all the closed parts of the platform.

Of course they're supporting some open source projects which is nice, but the internal conflicts are there: "yes we support open standards and they are very important" (stated by Nokia in many places with regards to eg. telecommunication standards) vs. "no we don't support any open media formats but we do support scrambled-and-play-restricted proprietary formats". Not to mention lobbying done by Nokia for software patents.

Basically it's probably just that Nokia in its current state cannot change its course any faster, and of course the final outcome is not clear. Either this maemo thing has to continue making Nokia a better company (from openness point of view, even taking risks to stand behind something that is believed in), or someone else has to do better than maemo.

to post comments

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 9, 2007 4:25 UTC (Tue) by shapr (subscriber, #9077) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a separate gstreamer plugin package that supports Ogg for the Nokia 770. I assume that package can be easily ported to the N800.

I would also like to see built-in support for open formats.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 10, 2007 11:34 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

I know there's a plugin, but it doesn't matter much - if it's not supported, it's not supported. I can get Ogg playback on Symbian devices too, but if I purchase hardware I want the vendor to support formats I'm going to use. That's why I'm not buying iPods, either, even though there are working replacement software packages for it. That said, N800 is more for Internet browsing (with closed source browser :) ) than for media playback.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 9, 2007 14:47 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] (2 responses)

First: http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog2006#head-1b...

Second:

I do not work for Nokia and I don't develop for this device, but I like it very much. I know little about Nokia and only heard about a few of their development activities. From that, I assume the following:

Nokia does not have a clear strategy in this. Nokia experiments, and they do it in a GOOD way.

They have started several projects, some of them open source, put some money into them and now they watch what happens. That's why they support Minimo, KHTML and yet still use Opera, all at the same time. They are betting on several horses.

Hildon and the 770 were an experiment to see if open source developers will pick it up and use it as intended - as a developer playground.

This was successful enough to come up with the N800, which I still do not consider an end-user device.

It is interesting that Nokia considers open source developers important enough to build this high-quality hardware (the 770 is a /very/ good device if you look at its hardware) and all the infrastructure the open source community needs.

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever. You can consider Nokia evil because of their stance on software patents (and I do not like that at all). You can consider Nokia good because of their support for several major open source projects.

They experiment. Most likely there are even some groups fighting with each other inside the company. All in all, I like most of what Nokia does in this regard.

And yes, you can easily install OGG for this device.

Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:31 UTC (Tue) by mrfredsmoothie (guest, #3100) [Link] (1 responses)

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever.

Please.

While I agree that the n770 is nice hardware, and the n800 looks slightly nicer, it's just ridiculous to assert something as assinine as that it is "one of the most open Linux devices ever." There are several software components (like _everything_ to do with battery management except the very low-level support in the kernel) and undocumented hardware components which remain proprietary, which Nokia seems very hesitant to document/release and without which the device functions extremely sub-optimally.

While I remain somewhat hopeful that Nokia will rectify this situation, it's been over a year already and if their apparent pace continues, it'll be quite some time and a whole bunch more hardware releases before any such claim of the "most open Linux device" has even a ring of truth.

Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:43 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

You're right, I was exaggerating.

Nonetheless, Nokia has build a, well, very open device and is keen on building an actual developer community around it. (I used to own a Zaurus and was disappointed by the lack of actual developer support for it.)