I finally decided to convert my video library to Mpeg4 containers, H.264 video and AAC audio, rather than mixing and matching what I had before that. This is due to the fact that I hardly use Enterprise to watch video anymore. Not only because my office is tremendously hot during the summer, but more because I have a 32” TV set in my bedroom. Nicer to use.
Attached to that TV set there is an Apple TV (running unmodified software 2.0.2 at the moment) and a PS3. If you add to that all the other hardware that can play video I own, the only common denominator is H.264/AAC in MP4 container. (I also said before that I like the MP4 format more than AVI or Ogg). It might be because I do have a few Apple products (iPod and AppleTV), but also Linux handle this format pretty well, so I don’t feel bad about the choice. Beside, new content I get from youtube (like videos from Beppe Grillo’s blog) are also in this format — you can get them with youtube-dl -b.
Unfortunately, as I discussed before with Joshua, and as I tried last year before the hospital already, converting video to this format with Linux is a bit of a mess. While mencoder has very good results for the audio/video stream conversions, producing a good MP4 container is a big issue. I tried fixing a few corner cases in FFmpeg before, but it’s a real mess to produce a file that QuickTime (thus iTunes, and thus the Apple TV) can accept.
After spending a couple more days on the issue I decided my time is worth more than what I’ve been doing, and finally gave up to buy a tool that I have been told does the job, VisualHub for OSX. It was less than €20, and that is usually what I’m paid by the hour for my boring jobs.
I got the software, tried it out, the result was nice. Video and audio quality on par with mencoder’s but a properly working MP4 container that QuickTime, iTunes, AppleTV, iPod and even more importantly xine can play nicely. But the log showed a reference to “libavutil”, which is FFmpeg. Did I just pay for Free Software?
I looked at the Bundle, it includes a COPYING.txt file which is, as you might have already suspected, the text of GPL version 2. Okay, so there is free software in here indeed. And I can see a lot of well-known command line utilities: lsdvd, mkisofs, and so on. One nice thing to see is, though, an FFmpeg SVN diff. A little hidden, but it’s there. Good.
The doubt then was if they were hiding the stuff or if it was shown and I did just miss it. Plus it has to have the sources of everything, not just a diff of FFmpeg’s. And indeed in the last page of the documentation provided there is a link to this that contains all the sources of the Free software used. Which is actually quite a lot. They didn’t limit themselves to take the software as it is though, I see at least some patches to taglib that I’d very much like to take a look to later — I’m not sharing confidential registered-users-only information by the way, the documentation is present in the downloadable package that acts as a demo too.
I thought about this a bit. They took a lot of Free Software, adapted it, written a frontend and sold licenses for it. Do I have a problem with this? My conclusion is that I don’t. While I would have preferred is they made it more clear on the webpage that they are selling a Free Software-based package, and that they would have made the frontend Free Software too, I think they are not doing anything evil with this. They are playing well by the rules, and they are providing a working software.
They are not trying to exploit Free Software without giving anything back (the sources are there) and they did something more than just package Free Software together, they tested and prepared presets to use for encoding for various targets, included Apple TV which is my main target. They are, to an extent, selling a service (their testing and presets choices), and their license is also quite acceptable to me (it’s like a family license, usable on all the household’s computers as well as a work computer in an eventual office).
At the end of the day, I’m happy of spending this money as I suppose it’s also going to further develop the Free Software part of the software too, although I would have been happier to chip in a bit more if it was fully Free Software.
And most importantly, it worked out of the tarball solving me a problem I was having for more than an year now. Which means, for me, a lot less time spent trying to get the whole thing working. Of course if one day I could just do everything with simply FFmpeg I’ll be very happy, and I’ll dedicate myself a bit more on MP4 container support, both in writing and parsing, in the future, but at least now I can just feed it the stuff I need converted and dedicate my time and energy toward more useful goals (for me, as in paid jobs, and for the users with Gentoo).
Heaven forbid someone add value and make free software usable to the masses and ask for just compensation. All are free to make an exact replica of the product and give it away!
You probably missed my point entirely, it gone straight over your head…
well, i think that this behavior would be the future of the software products. now developing closed source products costs too much to be able to mantain them in the long term. and while someone is mantaining a product there’s another software house that develops a better one that does the same stuff. the future is creating services and consulting on oss or free software and develop “solutions”. ibm has been the first to understand this and sun is starting to follow this mentality. i expect that before 2010 – 2012 all the major software houses to move to this approach or start the walk on the alley of death.anyway i’d be too glad to pay for similar stuff. cedega and the new fee wine based linux emulators are a good start on this. also the linmodem is a similar good project. i’m not reluctant to pay for a service that they provide. in the end they just try to have a little backpay for the effort they put in the project.
A closed-source and copyrighted nice interface to a bunch of cool (but cryptic to use) open-source tools? deja vu… I think SUPER is exactly the same thing, except that it is for Windows and it is “for free”.
sorry, i am a little bit too late, but here is the solution:http://www.linuxjournal.com…you can use free software tools to make standard compatible mp4/h264/aac files. there is a set of features that quicktime does not support yet, but you just have to know, what you can use.