Re: PDF, DRM, and "open" formats, part 1
- From: "David Starner" <prosfilaes@[redacted]>
- Subject: Re: PDF, DRM, and "open" formats, part 1
- Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 16:53:47 CDT
On 5/10/06, Bowerbird@[redacted] <Bowerbird@[redacted]> wrote:
> audio is .mp3 and .aiff.
MP3 isn't open; it's still entangled in world-wide patent issues.
Debian Linux won't distribute MP3 writers, and Red Hat, possibly the
most common Linux, won't even distribute MP3 players. In audio, you
have to choose between well-supported closed, patented formats and
poorly supported open formats (like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.) FLAC is
realistically the best archive format for long sound samples, since
MP3 and Vorbis lose data and can't be converted from losslessly. (FLAC
seems to be increasingly taking Shorten's spot.)
> video is .wmf and .quicktime.
Those are just awful choices. They usually use proprietary codecs that
aren't documented and are only supported by one vendor and 3133T
haxxor code. MPEG-4 in an AVI is patented, but well documented and
supported. Ogg Theora is the highest quality unpatented alternative,
but I believe all the patents on MPEG-1 (and MPEG-2??) have run out.
> migrate data.
> migrate data freely. migrate data frequently. that's all. end of story.
Migrating data is bad. Every time you convert from a non-lossless
video format or audio format, it looses data. Even blind conversions
from txt to HTML or HTML to PDF often produce worse copy than the
original. Documents should be kept in one master format and
transformed once for each new format