Specifying codecs for the web

Posted Dec 12, 2007 19:32 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Specifying codecs for the web by sfeam
Parent article: Specifying codecs for the web

I compare codecs to codecs, you compare codecs to hardware.

If you want to go into hardware-land look how bad clearly technically superior formats like
blue-ray and hd-dvd fare against simple encumbrance-free DVD.

to post comments

DVD isn't free either

Posted Dec 12, 2007 20:45 UTC (Wed) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link] (2 responses)

DVD is not encumberance-free. The licensing group charges a royalty fee for encoder and decoder implementations of the MPEG-2 codec and container suites. The DVD-specific parts of the format (subtitles, menus, navigation, virtual machine, disk layout, scrambling) are only available under NDA; I don't know if there are other contractual obligations that would count an encumberances. Much of that has been reverse-engineered, however.

DVD isn't free either

Posted Dec 12, 2007 20:54 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

On the hardware-side for all practical matters it is. I agree it's not a perfect analogy.

DVD isn't free either

Posted Dec 12, 2007 21:46 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

VHS vs Beta would be pretty close