[M4IF Discuss] What is the REAL advantage?

Robert Saint John rsaintjohn LIGOS.COM
Wed Feb 6 10:35:17 EST 2002


I think it's worth pointing out that when it comes to "the big 3", history
is probably a good indicator of how this will work out.
Supporting a codec/architecture is not the same thing as including it. In
the example of MPEG-1, each of the big three support it "out of the box" by
including the codec. The one exception to this might be Real; I can't recall
if the Real Players include the MPEG-1 decoder (by Digital Bitcasting/EMC?)
by default. But in general, I think one reason that there is such a great
deal of content in MPEG-1 format is because there is true support for it for
every player on every OS and platform.
The same cannot be said of MPEG-2. MS supports MPEG-2 by including hooks
that allow DVD Video players from different vendors to operate. There are
some straightforward MPEG-2 decoder options available for Windows, but it is
unlikely that MS will ever license or distribute MPEG-2. I believe Apple
only recently started supporting MPEG-2 out of the box (also for DVD), but
does not include an MPEG-2 codec with QuickTime. And Real has no support for
MPEG-2 whatsoever. I firmly believe (actually, I've been told) that this is
due to the cost of licensing. MPEG-2 became a victim of sorts (on the PC
platform) of the chicken and the egg syndrome. The Big 3 don't fully support
it because the content is not there. The content is not there because there
is no ubiquitous support. There are other reasons certainly (average stream
size of MPEG-2 for instance), but the licensing issue associated with
decoders is certainly a contributing factor.
Of course, it didn't stop MPEG-2 from becoming the most successful codec of
all time (without any help from the PC). I see few reasons why it should be
any different with MPEG-4. Any success on the PC platform (if that matters)
will be directly related to its full support by the Big 3. And I really
don't see that happening. More likely that MPEG-4 will become near and dear
to one of the Big 3, and that's how it will establish itself on the PC. But
I think we need to keep perspective about how important that really is. If
we look at this from a PC-Internet-Media Player -centric point of view,
we're missing one of the key points of MPEG-4 in the first place.
Robert 
-- 
Robert W. Saint John - rsaintjohn   ligos.com 
Director of Technical Marketing 
Ligos Corporation - http://www.ligos.com/ 
-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Siegel [mailto:adrockus   earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2024 9:10 AM
Makes sense that the "Big 3" would support MPEG-4 in their players, at least
to some extent. And once all 3 players support it, won't that force all 3
servers to support it or else be at a competitive disadvantage? But until
this is the case - I project maybe by Q2 '03 - I agree with Ben that there
really does not seem to be much of a point to investing in creating MPEG-4
content for the Web.
Even once MPEG-4 is supported by the leading players and servers, 
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