Quicktime

Since SL uses quicktime for video, and quicktime doesn't work in Linux, is SL going to imploy something different in the future to replace quicktime?

Well Quicktime is not the problem as this is not a codec itself and it is openly documented. The Codecs are the problem!

I am able to view quicktime mov files on linux via mplayer, where is the problem?

Well, from a programming perspective, quicktime is a collection of codecs purchased for use by Apple at different times. The part that I'm worried about is that SL on Win32 and Mac uses the Quicktime libs via Quicktime's API. Maybes a one off for Linux users.

Also the free versions (or variations obtained from the same source as apple) are not always exactly the same. A number of silly little issues with buffering, pixel ratio and color mapping, and slight compression differences cause some ugly (and somtimes) unstable output.

What alternatives do we have? Theora is not that good yet and rather for streaming? MPEG? Is also noit free. What would you suggest?

Vinci

h.264

I second that -- Flash uses h.264, and there's already sources out for decoding it.

Also, I think SL allows for the Quicktime display to be integrated. MPlayer has a OpenGL driver.

EDIT: Yes, but it looks like the driver may not have any mapping. Do we know what tricks SL does to integrate Quicktime?

We all know we can play most media formats on our Linux computers. We have mplayer and xine using ffmpeg and w32 dlls, totem using gstreamer with various plugins, xmms, flash etc. The problem is that all of these live in a legal grey area because of patents (and in the case of w32 dlls probably also copyright). Writing the code to use any of these players and libraries is easy, it's the lawyers and licenses that will cost Linden Labs, and they might not want to invest that in a Linux client. What they need to do is probably to out-source the problem. In another thread I suggested GStreamer and a deal with Fluendo to provide all the necessary plugins. I still think that'd be a good solution.

But, there migth be another way. You've probably used RealPlayer a few times, right? On Windows, I mean. Maybe thought it was bloated and slow? Didn't bother to try RealPlayer for Linux/x86 (or Solaris/sparc)? Well, maybe you should. It's actually pretty nice. It's a lightweight Gtk2 app with a simple interface, with hardly any bloat at all. (Even got a working browser plugin, convenient. And the Ogg plugins are included, not extras as on Windows.) The user interface code is based on the open source HelixPlayer, but there might have been some politics about that which I didn't bother to follow.

Anyway, my point is, it's free (gratis), plays a lot of media formats, including H.264, and should be legally possible for Linden Labs to bundle with Second Life for Linux, if Real agrees. It should solve the problem.

What I'd like to know is what former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, AKA Philip Linden, thinks about this.

Well H.264 is a patent protected standard that comes from MPEG , see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing "products and services are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology that their products use."

So this is really a no-go for any product that wants to be open source. it is not different in any sense to Quicktime.

That would mean that Seocondlife would be not included in distributions like Fedora and OpenSuse.

I think right now the only alternative for the future looks like Theora but i think it is not good enough, yet. The only other free codec of interest might be Dirac from BBC.

Excuse me?

The reference implementation for h.264 is open source. And Linden Labs probably already pays royalty fees for codecs, so there won't be any additional fees for the Linux client. They could use h.264 on Windows, Linux and Mac without having to pay for all three platforms separately.

And why should Second Life be shipped with distributions? Is Unreal Tournament on any Distro? Quake? SimCity 3000?

The 'free' open source Linux video client is gmp4player, available in the MPEG4IP suite, see
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpeg4ip/
I would expect the Linux SL client to hook to this in much the same way that the Windows&Mac client hook to the QT app.
But likely the hooks are not all there. You can probably start it as a secondary app, displaying in a separate window, but I suspect that what passes for the current API does not provide hooks to the video frame data. Being that it is open source, and the whole project in active developement, improving the API is quite possible, and I would expect such an improvement would be readily included for general distribution.

Fremont Cunningham

Zi I am not talking about open source here, but about patents. Patent-free and Open Source is not the same. There is a free H.264 implementation. There are also free Quicktime implementations - both are not paying royalty fees because they reengineered the protocol somehow. Otherwise both were illegal hacks.

It makes no sense to replace one patent technology by another. Why should they switch? The H.264. If you have read the link in the Wikipedia you would have read the sentence "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." So the question is if LL like to have lawsuits or wants to give money for each client to the patent holders as you also have to do it with MP3 software today.

And Wikipedia states about the free H.264 implementation x264 ( at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Software_implementations )
"x264 is not likely to be incorporated into commercial products because of its license and patent issues surrounding the standard itself."

If LL goes the open source way they are wise to use patent-free technology. BTW: Many game developers of closed source gaims are using Ogg-Vorbis for compressed audio already because they do not want to pay license fees to Thompson Multimedia/Fraunhofer .

I have studied these open source and patent issues for years and my foundings are not just some weird geek opinion but based on some facts. Otherwise I would not state my opinions.

About distros: LL gives the second life client away for free, so there goal is to distribute the client. In Linux this is not done by downloading a program from a website but by simply installing it as a package. BTW: They would not have the problems they have now if they had packaged the Linux client that way. Making packages is a good start. Skype does this also, although Skype will never be free software.

If LL does not want to distribute their client they can choose not not distribute it "the Linux way" in the future. This make the best sense if they would open source the client because then the package maintainers could repackage to reduce redundancy and make it easier to upgrade the client. Why do we have users that write their own installers? Because the Linux client yet is not available in the distributions, otherwise I could upgrade it by simply saying
'yum update SecondLife' without thinking how to copy config, etc..

Not much point including SecondLife in a distribution, the client has an average lifetime of one month, if you are lucky

OpenSuse gets around stuff like that by enabling a download via the Yast Online Upgrade, and NOT bundeling it within the distribution itself. That is how we get a proprietary driver for NVidia, via Suse.

Since that covers proprietary stuff in the case of the NVidia Driver, it would be a possibility for SecondLife as well.

Another note about H.264, it's basically unconstrained MPEG-4 (meaning some abilities of the original codec are purposely constrained in MPEG-4). MPEG-1 had constrained and unconstrained versions as well. The reason they did this is a big one: by constraining it, it allows the code to work with a small subset of its abilities and be easier on the CPU. H.264 is an absolute bitch to decode on CPUs. It hasn't been until recently that CPUs are able to properly handle it.

BTW, I find Theora just fine for use. The bitstream is frozen, so anything you make now will work on all future decoders, and libtheora works great as long as the video isn't too big.. and since you're streaming, I doubt they will be. The main problem is with the encoders, that they aren't fully optimized for spitting out the best image quality for a given compression rate.. though it's still not bad. Luckilly, since the format is completely open, no one's being stopped from making their own optimized encoder.

There are actually commercial games that make use of Theora video.

I love libtheora. I wish SL would drop quicktime if possible and use vp3 or theora.

I think you people are missing an issue here.

Do you really think that a switch in video formats is going to go down well with all the people who have gone to the effort to buy infrastructure and software and set up video streams in SL. I'd wager that most of the people providing video probably also pay a lot of money in tier, so you really don't want to piss them off just to satisfy a small number of linux client users.

The most sensisible option would be to shift decoding onto mplayer or mencoder and bring the result back in. Many of the quicktime codecs have OSS implementations now though some people chose to use the win32 DLLs instead. The end user is responsible for making sure that their quicktime implementation is legal

FWIW, SL works just fine with the blatantly illegal "Quicktime alternative" codec package for Windows (which is well worth getting if you can't be bothered with their crappy player)

I both agree and disagree. The people who support video streaming from their software want to provide content to as many people as possible. If they have the means to make a quick time video first off (like how many dozens of DVD rips? Not that I didn't enjoy seeing Constantine) they should just as easily be able to make an alternate format depending on the format change. From the outset LL said that they were using QT until they could find a suitable streaming format (I'll have to get back to you with a link on that quote) so it's not like they really want to keep with it too. And what if the people who currently have those DVD rips can't produce the movie in another format? LL changing to another format would boot out several illegal movies and dodge a possible lawsuit.

The alternative is to wait for the linux community at large to produce a free and legal codec so that LL can use it without any issues (not possible while QT's proprietary unless a group gets together and secures a license), or Apple can produce a linux version of QT for us to use (which last I heard was along the lines of "cold day in hell" chances).

There will never be a legal QT implementation in Linux. I think LL could change codecs, but they would have to provide tools to convert existing movies. I think although we might think that MANY ppl are affected this is close to nothing if you look ahead.

Many things LL does do affect many citizens and destroy some business models. I just would say: Shit happens. If LL chooses to make the standard look and hair of new citizens better and also the animations - this will affect those that make their money with better animations and skins, etc....

This happens often in SL. In order to go forward LL must make some cuts every now and then. This really is their business decision. It is another thing on how much we depend on LLs behaviour. As I heard theat Anshe Chung was suspended for some hours I thought that maybe it is a bad idea to build a business base on SL.

I think SL is not stable, not the world, not the clients, nothing! It is exciting but depending on it is very risky!!

Vinci

PS: Sorry a bit offtopic

agreed.

I would be all for a switch to another format, something that could be streamed. I'm told you can stream DivX avi's but I've never had the bandwidth to try it. But at any rate, if LL switched all of the clients to using mplayer as a decoder it would make life easier for everyone. There's support for all three platforms, it supports piping of input/output (at least on two of the three platforms, I'm not sure about Mac), and it solves two linux problems in one (how to stream music and how to stream video).

Quicktime can be streamed. Again: Why should they switch to another format?

Vinci

Because it's a proprietary format, and you'll be reliant on Apple for support. Quicktime in in non-Windows/Mac systems is not always possible (the attempted free codecs rarely support the latest version (and have poor support for the versions it "work" with); and using the win32codecs is not always possible (eg. 64-bit machines)).

Theora, on the other hand, is completely open.. the decoder, the encoder, the specs, etc. Use the supplied decoder, if you want.. the code is highly portable. If for some reason it doesn't work, you're free to fix it however you need. Same with the encoder. Don't want to use the existing code? Great. There's the specs, feel free to make your own codec.

So, there's a choice.. stay with Quicktime, which only supportes two OSs and relies on Apple for any support you may need or want. Or go with Theora, which supports several more OSs than Quicktime out-off-the-box, can potentially support many more, and offers you the knowledge you need to work properly with it in any manner you may want.

Ok, but all mentioned formats other than Theora and Dirac are also proprietary (and often patented). And there was also some confusion about "free software"="patent free". You can write free software (free implementations) that still get in conflict with patents (as they are reverse-engineered or whatever. So all this free software implementations will not be used by commercial applications because of the risk of the law suit. But as many ppl request a change of the format I wonder what they expect? There is also a free implementation of quicktime via MPlayer but this LL also never will use.




Ok, what YOU say makes sense. I would also suggest switching to a PATENT-FREE format. But just switching from Quicktime to H.264 will not change anything, really. So my question was directed more to those that don't want Quicktime but have given no real reason what they expect from a switch.

Vinci