Another HDTV Interview - Questions Needed!

[Nick F]

Right we are putting together another HDTV interview with the guys from www.mariposahd.tv which is the first site on the net to offer a high definition show.

Got any questions about the future of HD shows over the internet?

Questions please

[chrestomanci]

The guys at mariposahd.tv are making a fairly big thing about the their TV show being free, and distributed under a Creative Commons license, but they only distribute it in the closed (and probably encripted) WMV format, that is tied to and is only playable on windows.

Would it not be better to offer the files in an open video format such as XviD or H264, that is open source and playable on a wide range of devices?

[Nick F]

Originally Posted by chrestomanci

The guys at mariposahd.tv are making a fairly big thing about the their TV show being free, and distributed under a Creative Commons license, but they only distribute it in the closed (and probably encripted) WMV format, that is tied to and is only playable on windows.

Would it not be better to offer the files in an open video format such as XviD or H264, that is open source and playable on a wide range of devices?

Good question

More like that please......

[Stoo]

Might be good if it wasn't inaccurate:

H.264 isn't exactly an open source standard - it's a licensed technology:

As with MPEG-2 Parts 1 and 2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 amongst others, the vendors of H.264/AVC products and services are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology that their products use. The primary source of licenses for patents applying to this standard is a private organization known as MPEG-LA, LLC (which is not affiliated in any way with the MPEG standardization organization, but which also administers patent pools for MPEG-2 Part 1 Systems, MPEG-2 Part 2 Video, MPEG-4 Part 2 Video, and other technologies). Via Licensing also operates an H.264 patent pool. Some patent holders may not join either of the two licensing pools. (Licensing pools generally do not indemnify against third-party patents and cannot force patent-holders to join their pools.) This situation has caused reluctance to embrace H.264 among some potential adopters and may result in adoptions of alternative codecs that are believed to have lower licensing fees and lawsuit risks.

WMV is playable on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X without too much issue, and doesn't have to be DRM crippled (as the countless flood of freely available wmv files on the internet in general attests).

The main problem of distributing HD content over the internet is the not exactly small matter of file size and bandwidth, especially in the UK where virtually all broadband usage is now limited to between 20 and 50GB per month.

Using an example - Elephants Dream is currently at around 850MiB for an 11 minute 1080 res short film, scale that up to a standard 30 or 45 minute show, and you're talking several GiB, even with H.264 encoding, which currently seems unfeasible..

Do they really think that they can get a large audience given such limitations, or are they resigned to the fact that their shows are going to be a niché market at the intended resolution?

[directhex]

Originally Posted by Stoo

WMV is playable on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X without too much issue, and doesn't have to be DRM crippled (as the countless flood of freely available wmv files on the internet in general attests).

actually, you're a bit buggered for WMV on most platforms - on Linux it only works if you use (illegally ripped) 32-bit-only codecs; on Mac, you need to use slow-as-hell emulation on intel macs, as there's no intelmac WMV codec

[chrestomanci]

Originally Posted by Stoo

Might be good if it wasn't inaccurate:

H.264 isn't exactly an open source standard - it's a licensed technology

There is a difference between open source and an open standard. Something like H264, is a publicly documented standard that is patent encumbered, so anyone can implement it on any platform, if they want to distribute it then they might have to pay the patent holders. (if software patents are enforceable).

WMV is a closed standard. Microsoft hold the source code and specifications secret, and it is impossible to implement it anywhere without their say so, or ugly reverse engineering.

This would mean for example, that if someone wanted to develop an HD video iPod, then with H264, they can just go ahead and do it, and then pay the 2 cents per hour licence fee, but for WMV, they would have to beg Microsoft to let them, and pay whatever Microsoft thinks it can screw them for. (NB: I don’t know the exact per hour licence fee, but it is something like that).

Something like Ogg Theora is open source, and non encumbered, but that is hardly used because it is not mature.

Originally Posted by Stoo

WMV is playable on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X without too much issue, and doesn't have to be DRM crippled (as the countless flood of freely available wmv files on the internet in general attests).

WMV is only playable on x86 Linux via a nasty hack that wrappers windows DLL's. It is also possible to play them on AMD64 Linux by creating a 32 bit sandbox with a complete 32 bit Linux install inside just to run a media player, but for any other architecture or device then it is impossible.

Originally Posted by Stoo

The main problem of distributing HD content over the internet is the not exactly small matter of file size and bandwidth, especially in the UK where virtually all broadband usage is now limited to between 20 and 50GB per month.

Using an example - Elephants Dream is currently at around 850MiB for an 11 minute 1080 res short film, scale that up to a standard 30 or 45 minute show, and you're talking several GiB, even with H.264 encoding, which currently seems unfeasible..

Do they really think that they can get a large audience given such limitations, or are they resigned to the fact that their shows are going to be a niché market at the intended resolution?

WMV is subject to the same laws of physics (or in this case mathematics) as any other video codec. Underneath it is doing the same stuff with discrete cosine, wavelets, motion vectors etc that are familiar from other advanced video codecs such as XviD. I doubt their compression much better for the same quality than any other codec.

Doom9 did a comparison of video codecs a couple of years ago, which I think is still valid:
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-104-1.htm

Their conclusion at the time was that at the same bitrate XviD produced the best quality. Looking at their comparative screengrabs the XviD encode looks noticeably sharper than the WMV one.

I would agree that that filesizes are significant, but I would guess that the way mariposahd.tv have got it down is by aggressively compressing their video, rather than any magic in the WMV format. On the other hand if Elephants Dream is produced as a demonstrator of HDTV, then it will probably be produced at a high bitrate in order to get the best possible quality in TV showrooms.

In my experience, as a general rule of thumb, SD video encoded with MPEG2 takes the same amount of space per hour as HD video encoded with an advanced codec, so I would expect half an hour of HD to weigh in at about 1GB, any more than that, and they are encoding for ultimate quality rather than a balance between quality and size.

[Nick F]

Any more questions people?

[chrestomanci]

There is the obvous queston on funding & their business model. Are these guys living off some trust fund, or do they have a profit making bussness model in mind?