[linux-audio-dev] Lionstracs / Linux Audio at Musikmesse report

[Benno Senoner]

Dave Robillard wrote:

>
> You misunderstand.  I'm not saying you're stupid for suggesting using  
> the win32 codecs (if that's what you have to do to play the damn  
> things, that's what you have to do, it's hardly your fault). I'm 
> saying  Lionstracs is stupid for requiring you to do so. Especially 
> since they  sell Linux-running products, and have taken so much from 
> the free  software world.

The problem is that the guy that took the video used a camcorder with 
firewire output, he is not a Linux expert, he uses windows on his PC
which has very to easy tools to transfer the videos to the PC and make a 
video file out of it.
and as we know windows software usually lets you only encode using 
Microsoft's codecs.
Ok one could later reencode the videos to divx or whatever but it takes 
time and since the company's resources are limited no
one has the time to do it.
I'm against proprietary formats too but unfortunately there is no 
pratical alternative yet (a format that can be easily viewed by anyone).
Let's hope ogg/theora gets a hold in the market soon.
As said the target of the Mediastation is every user not only the linux 
user (the linux user will be able to tweak the keyboard in all it's aspects,
but the basic system is made to work like an embedded system without 
expecting special knowledge from the users).
The target are musicians and musicians usually aren't big computer 
experts and can't even install a third party video codec on their windows
PC but they are certainly interested in seeing the videos.
It' easy to speak from an idealistic point of view but the pratical 
reality in the business world is unfortuntately different.


> It's not a big deal, and I'm certainly not implying the company is  
> "evil" or whatever, but still.  I figured it was worth mentioning.
>
> I couldn't agree more about 'the industry' screwing the users over 
> huge  in this department.  Can't we just make proprietary file formats 
> flat  out illegal already? :)  What a beautiful day that would be...

I agree too but there is too much money involved in video so it will be 
hard to displace the proprietary video codecs especially the win32 ones 
since
they are installed on 90% of the world's PCs

cheers,
Benno

http://www.linuxsampler.org