A Man and his Penguin

Lately, the software libre community has been complaining about the DRM included on DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs. This is completely justified.

But one thing we often say is "Don’t just complain, contribute!", meaning that if there’s something you want to change about the software, you should just change it for yourself (or contribute to its implementation).

Why shouldn’t this apply to other things? Rather than just complain about formats that are intertwined with freedom-killing DRM, we should be creating an alternative. Obviously, the studios aren’t just going to adopt a DRM-free, open and unpatented format, so this might be more of a symbolic thing.

The basic idea is this: Create a format for video, audio, subtitles, and interactivity that is not tied to a particular physical media (i.e. it’s not tied to Bluray discs, for instance). This format will use patent-free audio, video and image formats that can be compressed and decompressed with open-source software, and interactivity provided through XML.

Standard Definition is slowly slowly starting to be on the way out - high definition (768p and 1080i) is where it’s at, and in the future it’ll be 1080p. Therefore, our open-source disc format should be compatible with these resolutions, as well as future-proof with the ability to support higher resolutions still!

As part of this, I performed a small test last night. I transcoded the Hi-5 Have Some Fun DVD into Ogg Theora format using Thoggen (yes! It works under Feisty!). Good results - I used the same bitrate as the DVD originally was, and didn’t seem to lose any quality. Audio and video sync was great. It took 5 hours to rip and transcode 1 hour of footage. Acceptable.

The only problem is, when I played back the footage at 100% size, my CPU was at around 100% capacity. When I tried scaling up to full-screen, it started dropping frames quite badly. Looks like this codec is not suitable for embedded devices like DVD players and HD-DVDs - this processor isn’t really a slouch, and it had only 576 lines to deal with!

Next up: XVid. Although, apparantly there are patent concerns about this one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Open-source application software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.