FOMS and Demuxed

On October 3rd and 4th I attended the FOMS workshop in San Francisco then Demuxed on the 5th. There were a lot discussions about video, mostly distribution and playback via web browsers. It was interesting as it’s a different take from my daily work on VLC. Vendors developed very specific techniques targeted at their particular use case, often to get around bogus past decisions or competing solutions.

As Matroska (used by WebM) was primarily designed for playback over network connections (that were slow at the time of design) it was interesting to see if we can cover all these use cases in an optimal way. It is especially important to remain relevant as the AV1 codec is coming soon. It seems to be getting huge traction already and might end up being the main codec everyone uses in the years to come, especially for web videos. Even though it’s targeted at high quality it seems people want to use it ASAP for very low bitrates. I suppose the quality gain for the same bitrate is even more significant there.

FOMS 2017

Two subjects particularly caught my attention in terms of challenges for the container.

Extremely low latency

It seems a lot of companies are looking at reducing the time between the moment something happens and the time it’s displayed on your screen. In the age of Twitter it sucks to see a goal or other (e)sport event happening on your feed before you actually get to see it. In games it also means the people streaming the game can interact in real time with what people are seeing.

Due to the nature of video encoding you can hardly get lower than one frame delay (17 ms in 60fps) and the transmission latency (10 ms if you have an incredible ping). But right now the target is more around a few second or a single second. One of the issue here is how adaptive streaming is currently used. It encodes a bunch of frames and then tell the user it’s available (in various bitrates). That’s because the container needs to know all the frames it contains before it can actually be used. So they wrap about 1s of video to have a minimum latency.

Matroska and EBML have a mode called live streaming. It allows writing frames as they come in and never rewriting the beginning of the file to tell how much data it contains or where the data actually are. So you can start reading the file even while it’s being written. Many years ago GStreamer was used to stream conferences that way (without even an actual file being written) and that’s how VLC 3.0 sends videos to the Chromecast. This is also how most Matroska/WebM muxers work. They write in “live streaming” mode by default: they write a special “unknown” value in the length field and when the size is known this value is overwritten. So a streamer can create files on the fly that people could start reading. And when the file is done write the proper values so that the next people reading from that file actually get proper values they can use to seek.

I hope the web people get a look at this as it would allow to go way below the 1s latency target they currently have. It would also work for adaptive streaming as you still get Clusters that you can cut in many parts on a CDN as currently done for WebM. This solution is already compatible with most Matroska/WebM readers. It’s been in our basic tests suite for at least 7 years.

CMAF

I learned the existence of a new MP4 variant called CMAF (Common Media Application Format). It’s an ISOBMFF profile based on Fragmented MP4 (fMP4). It was developed by Microsoft and Apple. The goal was to use a similar format between DASH and HLS to reduce the cost of storage on CDNs and get better caching. In the end it might not be of much use because the different vendors don’t support the same DRM systems and so at least 2 variants of the same content will still be needed.

This is an interesting challenge for Matroska as with AV1 coming there will be a battle for what container to use to distribute videos. It’s not the main adoption issue anymore though. For example Apple only supported HLS with MPEG TS until iOS10 so many Javascript frameworks remux the incoming fragmented fMP4 to TS on the fly and feed that to iOS.

Regular MP4 files were not meant to be good for progressive downloading, nor fragmented playback needed for adaptive streaming as the index was needed for playback and so needed to be loaded beforehand and not necessarily at the front of the file. The overhead (the amount of data the container adds on top of the actual codec data) wasn’t not great either. So far it was a key advantage towards Matroska/WebM as these were two of the main criteria when the format was designed 15 years ago. There were cases where MP4 could be smaller by at the price of using compressed headers. The situation changes with fMP4 and CMAF. In fact the overhead is slightly lower than Matroska/WebM. And that’s pretty much the only advantage it has over Matroska.

On a 25 MB file of 44 kbps (where overhead is really hurting) the difference between the fMP4 file and one passed through mkclean is 77 KB or 0.3%. It may seem peanuts, especially for such a small bitrate, but I think Matroska should do better.

Looking at the fMP4 file, it seems the frames are all packed in a blob and the boundaries between each frame in a separate blob (‘trun’ box). And that’s about it. It must only work with fixed frame rates and probably allows no frame drop. But that’s efficient for the use case of web video over CDNs that were encoded and muxed for that special purpose. There’s hardly any overhead apart from the regular track header.

One way Matroska could be improved for such a case would be to allow frame lacing for video. It is already used heavily for audio to reduce the overhead and since audio doesn’t need a timestamp for each block, the sampling rate is enough (except when there are drops during recording, in which case lacing is not used). We could allow lacing video frames as long as the default duration for the track is set (similar to a frame rate) and that each frame has the same characteristics in the Matroska Block, especially the keyframe flag. So keyframes would stand alone and many other video frames could be laced to reduce the overhead, the same way it’s done for audio. With such a small bitrate it could make a significant difference. On higher bitrates not really, but the overhead difference between fMP4 and Matroska is probably small if not at the advantage of Matroska in this case (thanks to header compression).

I will submit the proposal to the CELLAR workgroup of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), a group that is currently working on specifying properly EBML, Matroska but also FFv1 and FLAC. This is not a big change, it’s just something that we didn’t allow before. And because it’s already in use for audio in just about every Matroska/WebM file that exists, the parsing already exists in current players and may work out of the box with video frame lacing. It doesn’t add any new element.

The advantages of Matroska over MP4 remain the same for fMP4.

• It can handle a lot more codecs (VP8, VP9, Vorbis, Opus)
• It can be produced on the fly (see above for extreme low latency)
• It doesn’t require a special mode for streaming/progressive download and another for local storage or archiving, it’s always the same format
• Over 15 years of existence there has never been any patent claim over anything we use. This may not be the case for ISOBMFF where Apple and Matsushita hold patents and maybe others and in general from MPEG technologies like HEVC and MPEG-DASH.
• It was created out in the open (IRC, mailing lists) and continues to be developed in the open on the IETF mailing list.
• It’s totally free, even to get access to the specifications. 
  
  

Demuxed 2017

TL;DR

Matroska has a lot to offer to web distribution, like one frame latency at scale not possible with ISOBMFF formats, doesn’t require new designs for current and future use cases and is the most open and free solution.

Android Versions by The Millions

Last month I blogged about the missing market share progress graph that Google used to publish. And also provided some extra graphs based on the collected data, with much interesting facts to extract from them. I updated these data/graphs with the latest Play Store stats. But there was something significant missing and what really matters for app developers: how many actual people are on the versions, in millions.

To get this information, we need to know how many active users there are. We never had this information until Google I/O 2014 where Sundar Pichai announced that there are 1 billion users active on the Play Store at that time. The other regular piece of information I could find was the quarterly worldwide shipment of Android devices since 2010 up to April 2014. Using this data and a lifetime of 18 months for each shipped device, I managed to reconstruct the progression in millions of active devices and get to the 1 billion number we have now. The math may not be all sound, but in the end the growth is pretty linear from the beginning and the milestones from each IO keynote seem to coincide (number of activation vs active device). All these data are added to the original spreadsheet in the page "Active Users".

Given these grossly accurate data I could build the graph of each version progression in millions of users, not just in market share.



The road to 1 billion has been pretty linear. The last quarter global shipment are unknown yet. And they also take in account an explosive growth in China where the Play Store is not available.

Another interesting graph, and the real information I was looking for is how many users are currently using each API.

To compare with the original one



You can see the story is very different.

• KitKat was the fastest growing platform in recent Android history and it's showing even more by million of users. If the growth continue like that it may reach 300 million users in the next 3/4 months. Before Android L comes out.
• Although API v16 has been slowly declining for a while, the platform was still growing and so the number of users was still growing, the market share alone is not a good indicator. The number of users are in free fall though, despite still being the dominant API.
• API v10 has still 140 millions of active users, these are not Chinese users.
• There were never more Ice Cream Sandwich users than Gingerbread users. It topped 200 millions, compared to 300 millions for Gingerbread.
• The growth of API v17 is more significant when taking in account the amount of users, it's still growing well.
• On the other hand, API v18 is still not very meaningful in the number of users.
• There are still 7 million users using v8.

The good news is that supporting v17 and up gives you a very good amount of users. But failing to support v10 or v15 gives 250 million more potential users to your competitors.

We can assume that in the next 3 or 4 months v10 and v15 will drop below 100 million users each. And v19 should reach 250 to 300 million users and might have more users than v17.

Android Version Distribution

A long time ago, Google used to provide a graph of the evolution of version distribution with their monthly update of the Android Dashboards. I missed this graph ever since because it was giving a good indication of where we're at and what to expect in the coming months. This is especially important when planning a new project, to know what most users will have when your product ships.

After digging in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I reconstituted all the data published by the Play Store since December 2009 up to now (June 2014). The result is this bare spreadsheet table with a link to the source I used for each line.

Reconstructed Play Store Statistics

With the data in hand, it's now easy to create the graph that Google used to publish. But as soon as you see it (see in the Google Doc spreadsheet, after the numbers), you realize it makes more sens to group the Android versions by their codename (Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean and Kit-Kat). This gives this chart:



This graph looks familiar, just with more versions in it. Each major version seems to have the same life cycle and you can see that Jellybean is currently very dominant, that you get from the official monthly pie chart. What you don't get is the idea of how things are probable to move in the next 3 to 6 months. For example Gingerbread and lower currently represent 15% of the active Play Store users. When will it reach 10% ? Judging by previous Android versions, it took 4 months to get from 15% to 10%. So that would be in October of 2014.


This area view is nice, but there are other ways to represent the evolution by simply plotting the numbers in a line graph, as follows:


This graph, IMO, gives a much better idea of how things went for each version and the real importance of each version. Here are some noteworthy points:

• Each major version has a similar life cycle. A rapid growth and then a slow "logarithmic" decline.
• The decline starts 4 months after the next main Android version is released (4 for Froyo, 5 for Gingerbread, 4 for ICS, 4 for Jellybean)
• Honeycomb never had much of an impact
• Ice Cream Sandwich was never more popular than Gingerbread
• During Google I/O 2013, the most used Android version was Gingerbread (so much for minSdkVersion=14)
• Around April 2013 Froyo and Gingerbread lost a lot of market share at the benefit of Jellybean (harder to see in the area graph)

There's still another way to plot the data, from the time the version was introduced and counting how many months it was in use. That gives the following graph:


There's plenty of extra information that can be found from this graph.

• Since Gingerbread, the evolution during the first months of each version is very similar
• Older versions of Android were growing more rapidly to their peak
• After a slow start Kit-Kat has caught up with the growth of Jellybean
• We can project that Gingerbread will be below 10% in 4 months, ICS will be below than 10% in 2 months 

With Google I/O 2014 on the way and Android 5.0 likely to be revealed there, we can get an idea of the fate of Kit-Kat. It will be similar to the one of Ice Cream Sandwich. Of course, Jellybean is a bit cheating here, since it had 3 major versions. Here is a version of the graph, not grouped by main versions and starting at API v7.




More points can be found from this graph:

• Obviously the older versions had less versions to share with so had more market share.
• In the recent years API v16 is the one with the most market share by itself.
• Kit-Kat (v19) is growing faster than all the versions since Gingerbread (except for API v18)
• API v15 has reached its peak 15 months ago
• API v16 has reached its peak 6 months ago
• API v17 is growing very slowly but still growing
• All popular recent versions reached their peak around 15 months of existence
• Versions like v14 or v9 almost never existed

Conclusion / TL;DR: Know Android Users Through Fragmentation Graphs

Control

A while back I created a company in France on the side of my day job in hope to make a little cash on the side. I created GAWST. My first idea was to make some programs for iOS and OS X as people to pay more for softwares there. I had various projects lined up. The more advanced one was a replacement for the crap Finder, something more in tune with Windows Explorer. Then Apple introduced the App Store and plenty of rules and restrictions. It not possible anymore to sell a file explorer there. The App Store being the easiest and most obvious way to sell content there, I decided it wasn't worth the efforts (working on OS X was never my cup of tea).

So I switch to Android. I wanted something like Ghostery for Android, a way to see the kind of traffic goes to sites I don't want and a way to block it. So I started working on a proxy written from scratch in java. Something lightweight and fast. It took me a while to get it right but now it's pretty stable. I can see and block all the traffic just like I wanted. And I can do a lot more with this little tool. But then last week Google removed all the ad blockers from the Play Store. I planned to sell a restriction unlocker via the Play Store (while basic functionalities would be available to everyone). And once again all the time I spent on this project is wasted because a large company wants to have more control with what we can do with our machine.

I don't know yet what I will do with the code of gawsttp (my proxy). I use it every day on all my devices and it's useful, even a debug tool (or to test Twitter's API blocking). But what is pretty clear is that I won't try again to make a commercial project of my own anytime soon. I'm tired of all the rules that are only good for the big players, despite real user demand.

Résistance

When I read this discussion on Mozilla Dev thinking about supporting H.264 I felt like I had to say something. Not just as the creator of Matroska (on which WebM is based) but also as a general net citizen.

Ever since I started working on video technology I realized how vast and encompassing the subject is. In this particular case it's about letting patents dominate a fundamental web technology. It's about who is controlling the technological stack when you go on the Internet (aka market shares). It's about a technical decision that is actually changing the whole principle of the web: the technologies it uses have to be Royalty Free, be it on the user side, on the server side or on the creation tools side.

So far Mozilla was opposed to using H.264, not for technological reasons but on the principle that it didn't fit the Royalty Free web. They were also saying it was “not good for free softwares”, that if used “you [couldn't] have a completely free software Web client stack”, that would be “honoring the letter while violating the spirit” or that it “is not a game [they] are interested in playing” and eventually “it pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where [they] have leverage to possibly change the codec situation) to the platform (where there is no such leverage)”. None of what was said then has changed. So what has changed must be Mozilla.

When BootToGecko was announced my first reaction was whether they would support H.264 when it's hardcoded in the phone chipset. Because answering this question has a lot of repercussions. The amount of reaction to their answer is proof that the issue is deep. In fact it goes further than just H.264 which is hardcoded and paid for on the hardware (I suppose a lawyer should double check on that to be sure). It also means supporting the MP4 file format, which is also patented but not hardcoded in chipsets, unless they plan to only support H.264 inside Matroska (they already have the WebM code to do it easily), but I doubt that. At some point they will likely support MPEG DASH which made the W3C uneasy because it's not yet a Royalty Free technology. And there may be other patented technologies in the future.

The W3C will never endorse the use of the H.264 codec, it doesn't fit its rules. Vendors using it for the <video> tag are just using a backdoor to put patented technologies on the web, where it should have never been in the first place. Now the message is sent loud and clear, there are no reason big companies shouldn't try to impose their technological dominance on the web (Skype and Facebook come to mind). Everyone will surrender in the end. The bigger you are, the biggest momentum you have, the more chance you have to succeed. And patents are just as virus like as the GPL license: once you touch them you can't escape from them...

Maybe Mozilla is just acknowledging the fact that the web is going away from its core roots and what made it such a global success. But it still seems shortsighted to me. The timing of their announcement comes just weeks/months before new devices with VP8 hardware decoding are widely released. If they wanted to emphasis their continued support/favor for WebM they could at least have first released B2G on a device that has VP8 capabilities. Instead the message sent to those wondering if they should support WebM is: don't bother anymore, in the end we'll have H.264 everywhere. Such a decision to kill WebM should have been taken collectively. Especially since it's just to satisfy the need of a project that currently has 0 users and will have to compete against Apple, Google and Microsoft on the smartphone/tablet market. Billion dollar companies that heavily depend on this market for their future. Whereas Mozilla's future depends on product placement from the same companies. But that may change if I read this correctly: “We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees.“ Payment not required, but possible ?

To be fair, Google deserves a big share of the blame as well. Even though they provided VP8 to WebM, they didn't put all their weight in the battle. They have done too little too late. And there is no sign of that changing. They even failed to deliver on their promise of abandoning H.264 in Chrome to favor the technology they built and is perfect for the web. If there ever was a strategy for WebM I have never heard of it.

Good reads on the subject:

• A roundup of what's at stake here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/idealism-vs-pragmatism-mozilla-debates-supporting-h264-video-playback.ars


• A point of view I share completely: http://www.osnews.com/story/25715/Mozilla_forced_to_consider_supporting_H_264
  


• A wider shift on the web is already happening: http://gigaom.com/2012/03/23/open-vs-closed-what-kind-of-internet-do-we-want/


• Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the open web: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

The Open Web Conspiracy

So Google has announced that it will drop support for H.264 in future iterations of its Chrome web browser. WebM will be the favored format for video rendering inside the web browser. Until this announcement very little people really knew about WebM. It was considered as a pet project of Google, like so many others. But with all the press of the last few days, it's impossible to ignore WebM anymore.

What people didn't realize is that Google paid a good amount of money for this technology. Not to make even more money out of it, but simply because the video inside the web browser was going nowhere. It was either the expensive H.264 or the "low" quality Theora for those who can't afford it. So Google bought On2 and VP8 with it and made it free and completely open. The exact kind of technology that is mandatory in W3C standards. They also converted most of their YouTube library to WebM (in 360p and 720p IIRC) which probably also costs a lot in storage.

The tone of most reactions to this move was "how dare you Google?". Which is pretty astonishing when you think about it. People blamed Google for abandoning H.264 in a web browser. Completely ignoring the fact that Mozilla and Opera have always been on that position. AFAIK the web has not collapsed because of this decision. In fact FireFox is now the dominant browser in Europe and Chrome is the fastest growing one. I don't see how this move is going to hurt anybody already serving video on the web.

Not only that but Mozilla and Opera are the ones to thank for the existence of HTML5, the ones that stood against MSIE and it's proprietary way of interpreting the CSS standards. Once again there's going to be a war on standards. This time Google is joining the party. And once again the standard should win in the end. It's not a matter of who has the biggest one, but what an open web means and doesn't mean.

Everyone who has been involved in the Audio/Video business knows how much patents are a nightmare to deal with. A real way of stopping innovation. It also costs a lot of money for small players, to the point were real business is almost impossible if you don't have a size large enough. At CoreCodec a large amount of our revenues were going each year to the MPEG LA for the use of MP3, H264 and AAC. On many products we didn't make any money other than what we had to pay for patents. If there are better business alternatives, everyone should embrace them.

In the flow of articles/comments I read a common argument coming back was that H.264 is already there. Yes, but almost noone is using the <video> tag right now. It's only at the experimental stage. They confuse the web browser and the entire video ecosystem. Everyone who's interested in the story of that <video> tag knows that although a great idea it was a problem due to browser fragmentation and the lack of agreement on the codec, H.264 being out of the question for many key players and likely the W3C who approves the standards. Now there's a solution in sight. Again a solution for the web browser not for the whole world of video. It's not a first arrived/first served system. If H.264 doesn't fit the bill there is no point continuing (or ever) supporting it. Because in the end something else will have to be used. This fact has always been known by all users of the <video> tag from the beginning.

Also it's not because something is there that any future development should stop. In fact everyone working with the <video> tag knows that it's an evolving technology that is bound to change until it stabilize. There are a lot of things coming like adaptive streaming (IMO the most important part of streaming that will make browsers useful players), transparency (for better integration of video in rich UI), 3D (3D WebM files are already playable on YouTube) and even likely some form of DRM if the browser is going to become the universal "cloud" video player. All of these changes will require many investment for people providing online video. The sooner they know what are the possible choices and the ones that will be the best investment, the better.

Plus the video on the web is still in infancy. Adaptive streaming is coming (and IMO the real stopper right now for real use of the browser as a video player), live streaming is coming, 3D is coming (should browsers support MVC too like on Blu-Ray?), transparent videos (for better integration in UIs) and likely DRMs will come too if video rentals are ever going to work without Flash/Silverlight on a desktop. So don't assume that was exists now is set is stone and should never change. All these technologies will require work and money from the people serving videos. The earliest they know the options and the likeliness of success, the better choices they can make. And there is no reason investing time and money in something that will not last in the end. What is clear now is that WebM is not a pet project, it's here to stay.

I've been involved in the development of WebM even before it was out (no surprise that I'm a supporter then). And one thing that stroke me so far was that the most active in its development were Mozilla (3D and live streaming) and Opera (live streaming). Chrome has always been trailing with new features of WebM or even bug fixes. Now Google is finally putting its money where its mouth is. It's being pragmatic AND ideological, not one OR the other. The support of Flash being the pragmatic part here. Not only that but Adobe has been a supporter of WebM since day one (and even before). I wouldn't be surprised if Flash would support WebM in the future. That would make sense for them too. If that ever happens, WebM will be the format that would play on all platforms, unlike H.264. And would likely be decisive in making WebM the first choice when putting video on the web.

In the end one can always think of it as a big conspiracy from Google, Mozilla and Opera to free the web from audio/video patents, and keep the World Wide Web utopia alive and kicking.

2011: The Year Apple Went Back To Its Niche

Hello I'm Steve Lhomme. You may know me from the Matroska (.mkv and .webm) format I (mostly) created, or working for years on CorePlayer from CoreCodec on platforms like Windows Mobile (5 & 6), Symbian, PalmOS, iOS, Android, etc or lately from my work on the Plume Twitter client on Android for LevelUp Studio.

For many years I've followed and been involved in the rise of mobile computing and smartphones in particular. I've used and developed for about any of these OS'es (that would allow some form of native code). In that time I've seen the growth of the iPhone (from the early version without a SDK where we had CorePlayer already running) up to the point it became almost a world of its own. And with great power comes great responsibility. Except that Apple has been acting very aggressively, for their own profit.

Recently I've started noticing an unfair bias towards Apple from the press and from friends. Either because one gives credit to Apple for more than they deserve or because it gives advantages to the Apple platform that IMO is not good (more on that later). While Apple was mainly the only player with a modern platform, it was fine. But now that Android is on level with iOS and exploding in market shares, it's time to rethink the old habits.

The current situation is that on the OS level Android is more or less at the level of what iOS offers. The OS was not meant for tablets and thus the ones sold so far leave to be desired. It seems that Honeycomb (Android 2.4 it seems) will leap forward and make Android more than decent on tablets. I personally think the tablet market is overrated, but that's another debate. On the hardware level there is certainly a lot more experiment & innovations on the Android side. We now have dual-core, tiny devices, up to 4.3" screens, 4G/LTE, car dashboards, 5" and 7" tablets, tablets as TV companions from Vizio or Panasonic, etc. And depending on your needs, there's usually one device that is exactly what you need. Just like not everybody wants to be dressed the same, not everybody needs the same from their phone/tablet.

But with all the CES announcements, I've seen plenty of news/comments on Apple fanboy sites, that whatever, the iPhone/iPads are better. Even before Honeycomb was demonstrated and devices were tested by real persons. For many Apple has become a religion to follow, and denying all other "gods" that are not theirs. This is not new (Mac vs PC). But it's always surprising when it comes from bright minds. And it's even more dangerous when a whole economy has been built on feeding solely the iOS ecosystem (and 30% of it in Apple's pockets).

Things have changed radically since the last 6/12 months. Android is now dominant globally and even in the symbolic USA market. Unlike iOS it's completely free and open. That's why hardware and software innovations are now happening there. And the trend is not going to change. The head start that Apple had is now gone.

The freedom in Android means anyone with a Windows, Mac, Linux computer can develop for free their software and run it on their devices without paying anything to Google. That is not possible with iOS. One can easily see which one is going to be picked by coders in developing markets. Not only that, but Android doesn't require a PC for synchronization or system updates. In doesn't require you to put your billing information in iTunes before buying apps. In a world where more and more people use a (smart)phone and not a PC, that's an important growth factor. One may argue that poor people don't buy apps. But they are likely to buy food, detergents, gas, etc. So the advertising model can work in these areas. So I think the smartphones are going to be a lot bigger there too. It's a lot better if it doesn't require a PC.

Because of all this, I think Android is going to explode even more this year. And unless Apple has something special about to be released (rumors don't seem to show that), it's going to lose even more significant market shares. And like the Mac vs PC war, it's going to end up in a niche for trendy/hip/rich people. Which is probably fine for Apple as long as it has a good share of the #2 position. History is just repeating.

NOT sent from my iPhone (yes, I still use one)

Upgrade your music/movies

So a lot of people are talking Steve Jobs comments on the DRM issues. I haven't read it yet. But it made me think about the digital economy for content/entertainment.

People have been buying music at 128 kbps (MP3 or AAC or WMA) or DVDs in 480i resolution, and with DRM. If they want to get a better quality music/video or without DRM, they would probably have to buy it again. In software you usually get free upgrades or pay less than the full product for an upgrade (even Microsoft does it). So it should be the same for music. If you want to buy the same music in lossless or transparent, you shouldn't have to buy the whole thing again. That was necessary when you had to buy a physical object to upgrade your qualiyt (tape/LP to CD, VHS to DVD). But from digital to digital, there's no need. The only problem is to do that you need some DRMs :(

So the non use of DRM might actually mean there won't be cheap upgrades... How ironic !

The Universe Is Too Big For Aliens

According to this study, we haven't really met the aliens (officially speaking) because the universe is too big and it would take them too long to probe it and find us at the time we are developped.

There's probably some truth in this, but it considers that travelling at the speed of light is not possible or even close. But it's already possible in labs. It doesn't take in account teleportation that already exists in labs too, the use of dark energy, maybe telepathy and all that stuff we don't understand yet. So I think the answer is not there yet... Maybe we are the first ones to be that advanced in the universe ? Or that the matter is not travelling, only the souls ?

New Concepts Catalog

This article lists all the modern concepts that will shape the future of science and intelligence.

I haven't had time to read them all and the related articles, but a lot of them seem interresting.

DivX is bye

It's now official. I'm going to leave DivX, Inc. on the 31st of January. I will be concentrating on the CoreCodec products like CorePlayer and also on matroska related stuff.

For the whole time at DivX I have worked on DrDivX which is open source and available on SourceForge. I hope the project will still continue and evolve even after I left. Maybe I will still contribute here and there. Especially since it relies on a CoreCodec product: CoreMake to create the project files on Windows (MSVC++ Express) and Mac (XCode).

I decided to leave because I've been working on 2 jobs at the same time for many months and it's exhausting. Now that CoreCodec has some financial stability I can safely switch to this prefered job and work on the technologies that we create.

The revolution according to Apple

So yesterday Apple unveiled the iPhone. There's a lot of buzz about it, but once it gets down what will remain ? Engadget list a few of the missing features. But Apple presented it like there was nothing close to this before...

So what's new about this (smart)phone ? The big touchscreen. Even a technology they call multi-touch. So maybe the revolution for Apple is to be able to use 2 buttons (fingers) when the Apple computers only do one (unless you buy a 3rd party mouse).

That's it. All the rest exists and is available elsewhere. The iPhone will be available in June in the USA and in Q4 in France. Far from revolutionary and a big late. If Nokia release their internet tablet that does 3G phone they are done...

Free Will

What is free will ? IMO that's (so far) the main difference between machines and living objects. And it's more than a technical debate, as it implies that we are just machines and that sophisticated machines could have it too (as an inate property ?).

This article covers what free will might be after all... That's the first time I see it mentioned, while I've been convinced that's a crucial point for the future. If machines can have free will too, then they can decide on their ownn (and without us).

A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

EU Governments aware of the machine rise

This article is mostly about what the BT (British Telecom) manager said about the importance of women in the future. But there's this interresting quote :

"The government is aware of this trend," he insists. "The EU is looking into it, not just in terms of machine intelligence, but as a problem of globalisation and machine intelligence leading to a surplus of men. It doesn't want large numbers of unemployed men standing around on street corners. We will see lots of demonstrations"

It surely is the biggest challenge of the coming decade. A whole new/different society to build, based on new values (or just the good old money...).

Big Brother is the future (and vice versa)

A nice article about Vernon Vinge's views on the future. And especially about security and privacy. It's clear that people will want more privacy, but technology will also allow to monitor people more efficiently on whatever they do. It's hard to know where the thin limit will be, and nobody has really started to work on that among politicians...

An interresting quote too about the real economic power :

The leaders of most powerful countries are coming to realise that the most important natural resources are not factories or the size of armies. Economic power is in the size of the population that is well-educated, creative and generally happy enough to be optimistic enough to want to do something creative.

France is the enemy

I usually like the NYT articles since they are usually well informed and give a good overview on a subject. But this article got me wondering...

Apart from the doubtful humour about a foreign country and their citizens (What has possessed the French?) the article is just a plead for Apple's cause, no less. Apparently the author considers that Apple is the only online music retail store worth considering. And that it needs to be protected as such. If that's not a defense for a de-facto monopoly I don't know what it is.

The author completely ignores the fact that worry most people about the iTMS and DRM in general: locking content in a proprietary solution. When you buy on the iTMS you can only use the content on your computer or your iPod. The iPod doesn't support any other form of DRM and the Apple DRM is not available to license. So if you have $200 worth of content from Apple and for some reason your computer crashes you lose all of it. And if you want to listen to your music on a device on another device you can't. And that's precisely what the french law proposes to get rid of. Make sure that the user has control on the content he bought, not the companies that make hardware and softwares.

penalize companies that harm consumers, not the ones that succeed by building better products.

Better products doesn't mean they don't harm consumers. In the long run locking yourself in a technology and having no technical means to get rid of it (legitimately as the law puts it) is a hidden suicide... I'm still waiting for a class action against Apple by users pissed that they can't use their content elsewhere than the Apple world. Then we'll see who is harming consumers (with a monopoly enforced by digital lockers).

Apple largely created the online market for legal music.

I think there were many other DRM solutions before Apple presented theirs.

Second, iTunes has lots of music. Largely because of the innovative iTunes FairPlay copy protection and digital rights management software, Apple persuaded major record labels to let them sell much of their best content online. The combination of simplicity and variety proved a huge winner.

There have been reports about the recent attemps by record labels wanting to change the price policy of the iTMS. The idea was to have new content more expensive and older content cheaper. That sounds totally fair. But Steve Jobs and its marketing decided that the unique price was better. It's funny that the technology provider (because of its market position) think they can impose how content owner should sell their stuff... The result is that there won't be a deal renewal, but the content will remain on the iTMS. The difference is that content owner could pull out their catalog at any time, turning the iTMS into a useless technology and the iPod owners in despair. The huge success of the iTMS will turn into a catastrophy... So in short I don't think the picture of labels being happy with an all in one solution (where they have no voice) is a realistic picture.

If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes. Right now, after the royalty payment to the label (around 65 cents) and the processing fee to the credit card company (as high as 23 cents), not to mention other costs, Apple's margin on 99-cent music is thin. Yet it continues to add free features to iTunes because it helps sell iPods.

At least it's clear to everyone what the FairPlay is about: sell iPods. That's the very reason why Apple make their best not to open it to any partner (just look at the flop of the iTunes phones).

Now would opening (doesn't mean breaking) Fairplay would boost the iTMS: yes. Would it boost music sells: yes. Would it boost iPod sales: likely if you can convert WMA DRM to Fairplay. So what is wrong about opening it ?

Apple argues that sharing the codes could make the pirates' job easy enough to wipe out the legal market.

That's considering licensing technology is a public publishing. AFAIK Microsoft Janus (DRM) is licensed to many companies and there's no tool online to crack it. This argument is just FUD created by Apple and spread by "journalists".

Agitators might claim that this is the very goal of the French bill: why else would it also reduce the maximum fine for consumers caught illegally downloading music from 300,000 euros (about $371,000) to just 38 euros (less than $47)?

It's funny how the journalist considers paying 300,000€ for downloading a track online is OK. The 38€ fine is per download. Only when a law is fair it can be respected.

Usually, rich countries don't meddle with others' intellectual property because they fear retaliation. So why don't the French fear retaliation now?

Retaliation against France. Now we have big words to defend Apple against France (one of its biggest market in Europe)... In short the author is saying: don't mess with a USAn company or we'll retaliate on other markets. I guess he/she must have a lot of Apple stocks to go so bold on an industrial (and actually a cultural) choice.

One reason may be that they have concluded France will never really compete. If the Internet will always have an American accent, why not go after it? Sometimes, the red flag of revolution is surprisingly hard to distinguish from the white flag of surrender.

There were 2 options in the law: global license which would be a tax on download or DRM interoperrability. Both are considered good routes to make the digital economy fair and flourish. So I see innovation possibilities where the author see surrender to a monopoly.

Before declaring pre-emptive war on iTunes, however, perhaps the French would do best to remember a lesson from 1789. Sometimes the very people calling for revolution are the ones who end up losing their heads.

So far I haven't heard any voice in France against the proposed law to defend iPod. All the voices are crying that there will be less space for private copy. So the author is just fantasazing and maybe he thinks Bush will attack the french (once more) to defend Apple. That will make the french even more proud...

Lilly Is Here

As any other father I want to tell the world that my baby Lilly was born yesterday (2006-04-26) at 21:35 in Hawaii. She weighs 3.9 kg (8.6 pounds) and measures 53cm (21 inches). She has dark hair and blue eyes.

It's both a wonderful and happy moment as much as a sad one. Unfortunately I couldn't be there for legal reasons. But Cecilia and the baby are doing fine so that's just enough to be happy. We'll be together in Europe around june.

Welcome to the world Lilly!

1366x768 & 750Go

In the modern world advertising for false information can be punished. Yet tech companies have found legal ways to cheat on their product specifications.

My LCD TV claimed to do 1366x768 pixels, as many (most) of them do. But when I plugged it to my computer only 1280x720 (720p) were available. I thought there might be something wrong in my setup even though I didn't notice any resizing effect typical for LCD (blurry when not in native). I only found out the trick with an HDBeat article. The TV does only have 1280x720 real pixels. They only pretend to have more due to the overscan found on analog TVs (analog TVs cut the borders of an image). So there will never be 1366x768 physical or displayed pixels. This number is just imaginary.

Seagate also announced a 750 GB harddisk drive a few days ago. But don't expect your OS to report 750 GB when you plug it. HDD manufacturers have decided a long time ago that 1 GB = 1,000,000 bytes and not 1,024x1,024 bytes. It didn't make such a difference for small disks. But now the difference is 34.75 GB (real bytes). If they keep the same trend, a 1 TB disk will actually contain 953GB (70GB or 5% less).

DRM myths

I don't want to become a DRM advocate, but when I read articles like this I feel like a more balanced view should be expressed.

Both Lessig and Stallman are smart people. But it turns out they are very idealistic, and unrealistic, in their opinion on DRM and freedom in general.

The values of the Free Software Movement are the freedom to cooperate, and the freedom to have control over your own life. You should be free to control the software in your computer, and you should be free to share it.

The GPL that Stallman wrote (or was the main driving force) doesn't give you the freedom to share. It is an obligation. You replace a freedom with a constraint. It really feels like someone is deciding for you what kind of freedom is good for you. So it's always surprising to see him attack other Open Source licenses (that sometimes give you all rights) in the name of freedom.

Now about DRM, the freedom given to people (restricted rights) is exactly what they paid for. If they want more rights they should pay more money, and if they agree on less rights, they should pay less. That's the very basic reason why renting a DVD is cheaper than buying it. And the market, in other words the consumers, will decide what kind of rights they want. It's just unfortunate that the whole content market is ruled by oligopolies (on movies and on music) and therefore the DRM offers/choices are very scarce. But this has nothing to do with why DRM is good or bad.

the whole point of DRM is to deny your freedom and prevent you from having control over the software you use to access certain data.

When smart people start using stereotypes that means there's something fishy going on. After all the whole GPL relies on copyright laws. And Stallman, as such, is a strong defender of copy rights (copyleft as they call it) and intellectual property. But apparently electronic ways to ensure the rights are always respected are not good. He probably considers that doing this in court is preferrable, even for people who earn no money on what they create (like most GPL devs do).

Second-Hand Digital Content ?

As the market for DRM is slowly maturing into a digital economy, it's interresting to think about how it's going to evolve. Namely what will happen to the content you paid (for a premium price given the real cost of the medium) after you don't want it anymore ?

So far you could sell your old vynils, CDs or DVDs to a second hand shop. And that created a real economy where people would purchase something they would keep for a few months and then get rid of it. But I think this possibility might soon become the past.

Consider the Managed Copy system introduced in future DRMs or the interroperability law in France. It allows you to go from one DRM format to another. But it's just a copy, the original is still intact. So if you sell the copy, you still have the original. You become a distributor and not a second hand seller, especially since you have the digital ability to make thousands of copies to sell. I don't think any content creator, major label or studio will ever let you do that.

And it's too bad, because given the digital possibility one could buy a DRMed movie (as in ownership, not renting) watch it, and then sell it for (almost) the same price. It would be fair to the buyer since the copy he would buy would be like brand new. Then this buyer could watch it and sell it after for (almost) the same price. etc. And if you put a website in the middle that acts as the middle man to find buyers/sellers for a content, it can be instantaneous. That means, the content you buy would be just as valuable as the price you paid, minus the price you resell it. It could be 0 in some case.

It could even make you earn money if the content is in high demand and there's no offer to sell it (the rule of offer vs demand). As in the analold world some content could be produced at a limited amount of items (DRMed copies) and the collectors would rush to buy one and maybe sell it for twice the price or even more. They could also sell a rare copy 10 years later for an expensive price (if all other copies have been destroyed).

Too bad the current DRMs won't let you do that...