Tag: apple

H.264 licensing revisited and explored

I’ve got a backlog of stuff here, so some of these might be a bit short.

First up, revisiting video codec patents, which I originally wrote about in February.

A recent post on librevideo.org was also written after Ben Schwartz’s post “No, you can’t do that with H.264” as mine was. From the article:

In the interest of clarifying the ambiguous claims regarding the licensing terms of using the AVC/H.264 video technology, Libre Video has taken the time over the past few weeks to contact the MPEG-LA directly, the licensing authority responsible for administering the patent pool for the H.264 specification. We have asked them various questions related to what we feel are important issues surrounding the terms under which normal people are permitted to use hardware products that they have purchased and the resulting multimedia content created with them.

Obviously, there is way too much to quote here, but the important conclusions to draw from Libre Video’s correspondence with MPEG-LA are:

  1. The simplicity of the analog media era where one buys, say, a VHS tape deck and can pretty much do what one wishes with it are over. Software patents turn what should be simple tasks into a legal minefield ready to explode under those that least expect legal obstacles.
  2. Even professional products do not include a professional H.264 license. This includes, say, Final Cut Pro.
  3. The AVC licensing only applies to an end product, and can be avoided by transcoding the video to, say, Ogg Theora or the upcoming VP8/WebM.
  4. The patent licenses required to legally decode H.264 make it impossible to write a free software (GPL) H.264 decoder. This is most unfortunate on the part of MPEG-LA and the companies that have chosen to embrace this standard.

I’m disappointed in MPEG-LA and the companies which formed it. This is perhaps the biggest step backward for user freedoms since the DMCA; many otherwise law-abiding free software users will wind up breaking the law just to convert their H.264 video to formats like Ogg Theora.

I propose the following solution:

  1. For personal use/non-profit videos, MPEG-LA waives the royalties on software-based decoding of H.264 for the purposes of conversion to another video format.
  2. Apple, Microsoft, and other developers voluntarily rename video editing products with the word “Pro” or “Professional” in the name (such as Final Cut Pro) to a new name not including the words “professional” or “pro” and putting a prominent disclaimer on the box: “The H.264 decoder and encoder are licensed for personal use only. Use of the H.264 video format allowed by this software product may require additional licenses from the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA).”

These are the fair things to do. The first would make the H.264 decoder in ffmpeg legal for most of its uses. Maybe MPEG-LA would need to raise their royalties to compensate for “lost” revenue. I have news for MPEG-LA: many of the users of ffmpeg would never pay you one red cent anyway. A few are effective scofflaws, but most are easily convinced that having to break the law to convert their home movies to another digital video format without paying even more money is at best ludicrous and at worst insane.

The second just makes sense. This, of course, is exactly why the companies in question will never do it. But that’s another rant for another day.

Microsoft Windows, updates, reboots, and the principle of least surprise

It’s been a while since I’ve ripped on Microsoft, which I was reminded of after seeing Matt Mullenweg’s recent blog entry about Windows and it’s horrid habit of rebooting to install updates, without specifically being told to do so. This wouldn’t be nearly as bad, if Matt didn’t link to a blog entry he wrote six years ago describing the same exact thing which at the time cost Matt quite a bit of unsaved work. (At the time of this earlier entry, Robert Scoble was working for Microsoft and apologized to Matt in his blog. By the way, this is something I suspect would never be allowed from a Microsoft employee now, and looking back at it, I’m a bit surprised Robert got away with it.)

Now, most people would think Microsoft would listen to their customers(*) and fix what is widely perceived as a bug, even if it was originally an intentional design decision. Especially after someone as high-profile as Matt has blogged about it, now twice. For the uninitiated, here’s what Matt is talking about in those entries:

  • The Windows Update tool downloads its updates and installs them. There are three options: manually download and install, automatically download and manually install, or automatically download and install.
  • At the conclusion of the install, if one of the updates requires a reboot (which, given this is Windows we’re talking about, is almost always the case), a dialog box pops up with the option to “restart now” or “restart later” with a timer. Originally, this timer was 5 minutes; I think it’s been changed to be longer (15 minutes?).
  • “Restart later” just means the dialog box pops up again some time later. I’ve never measured how long it is, I just know it keeps nagging until you reboot, and there is no way to select “go the #%&$@ away, I’ll reboot when I damn well please.”
  • “Restart now” does what it says.
  • If no action is taken when the timer expires the system reboots. This is almost never what the user (who is in effect Microsoft’s customer) actually wants.

This last bit is why people like Matt write blog entries like that one. This is also why people like me quit running Windows at all. My first choice for a new PC is “one without Windows on it.” My second choice is “one I can wipe the Windows install from as soon as I get it.” (I’ve been stuck using a Windows XP system enough to know this is how it worked as of that version. I quit using Windows at the first opportunity, for reasons that should be obvious. No PC that I actually own has run any version of Windows since 2002 April, which is now over eight years ago.)

The reason the timed reboot is such a disaster is that it violates the principle of least surprise (also called the principle of least astonishment). A computer user expects the computer to stay running absent a specific command to reboot. (I’m being generous here, given this is Microsoft Windows in question, an operating system not exactly known for its stability.)

In addition, Microsoft puts scary warnings in the Windows Update component which encourage users to select “automatically update.” From Matt’s post:

I can’t reconcile that it was due to a feature of an operating system, a feature I was told to turn on to stay safe, and a feature that bugs you when it isn’t activated. I trusted the computer because of the improvements to stability Microsoft had made in XP and SP2. Trust like that is slow to build and easy to break.

Now, Ubuntu gets it right (or at least did as of 9.10; I lack the experience with 10.04 to confirm). Most updates do not require a reboot. Those that do (new kernel versions), pop up the dialog box once. Yes, that’s right, once. If you say you would prefer to reboot later, the dialog box is gone for the rest of the session. The only bad part of this is that hibernating is broken from that point forward until you reboot and you just have to know this from experience. Since Ubuntu’s Update Manager is relatively unobtrusive (it pops up once per day if dismissed) this effectively becomes a non-issue. If you don’t use hibernating mode it’s not an issue.

Anyway, my point is that it’s inexcusable for Microsoft to allow what most users consider a horrid bug in place all this time, especially given a competing operating system shows how it should be done. I don’t know the right way to fix this in Microsoft’s world. I do know defaulting to a reboot after a time delay is not an acceptable answer to the majority of computer users (note, that’s computer users in general, not just PC users or Windows users). Then again, maybe the answer lies in not requiring a reboot after just about any system update. I’m not holding my breath waiting for Microsoft’s fix for that one, though.

(Note: When I refer to Microsoft’s customers here, I refer to the end users of Windows. I know technically Windows is usually sold to OEMs like HP, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc. but they aren’t really the customer here. It is the end user that Microsoft ultimately aims to please.)

Apple caught doing the flip-flop: the iSealClub story

It’s been a while since Apple’s made a gaffe I’ve felt like writing about. Of course, that changed when this little gem popped in front of my eyes.

Techcrunch recently published a story about an iPhone game that didn’t pass Apple’s review team. Not that it’s exactly news anymore that Apple is completely arbitrary and capricious with which iPhone apps are officially allowed to be sold and which aren’t, but this sets what I believe to be a new low.

The game in question is iSealClub, a game based on the Canadian Seal Hunt. The core of the game is clubbing seals to death, which may well make a few people uncomfortable.

From the article:

[iSealClub developer Matthew] Smyth emailed Apple before ever writing the app to see if they would find it questionable, and they responded that they didn’t pre-approve apps. So Smyth built it. And yes, it was rejected on the grounds that it contains “content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable.”

How objectionable is violence? So objectionable that Apple has in the past approved many more games for the iPhone that are at least as violent than iSealClub, such as Turkey Hunt, Deer Hunter 3D, Pocket God, and Grand Theft Auto.

This is Apple at its most egregiously hypocritical. This epitomizes everything that is wrong with Apple’s iron-fist rule of the iPhone platform. If Apple itself does not want to sell these under an App Store labeled with its own company name, that’s fine. But in the interest of defending free expression, these should be available from third parties without having to play with fire by jailbreaking one’s iPhone.

I challenge Apple’s PR people to come out and say in as many words that Apple as a company actually does not support free expression when it comes to the iPhone. Apple’s actions already say this; why would they not put their money where their mouth is?

Exiting the rat race: a story of an iPhone developer’s departure

Dan Grigsby, best known for his Mobile Orchard blog for iPhone developers, has decided to hang it up per his recent blog entry which was also reported in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. Dan draws an excellent parallel between two historic situations involving “ask permission” environments and the current situation involving Apple’s iPhone and its increasingly more restrictive development environment:

In the mid nineties, ahead of even Amazon.com, I founded one of the earliest e-commerce companies. At that time, most banks forbid Internet credit card transactions. They were fearful, so they enacted policies that blocked innovation. Of course that wasn’t universal: a few banks bucked the trend and, together with entrepreneurs like me, created a new sector of the economy. Pedants will point out that we still needed a bank’s permission; more reasonable readers will observe that there was no single daddy entity whose approval we required.

Early last decade, at roughly the same time and in parallel, I created a company like PayPal. Person-to-person payments threatened the banking establishment to such an extent that we were routinely told PayPal-like transactions were criminally illegal. A decade later, Wired Magazine placed PayPal as the cornerstone of the future of money.

The innovation in both of these examples made the establishment uncomfortable — they’d have stopped us at the gates had they been able too. Apple can, at their least bit of discomfort.

The lessons here should be relatively obvious: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Apple can exercise what is in effect an absolute veto over any particular iPhone application. Of course, there is no shortage of applications that will make Apple uncomfortable as a corporation; there are tons of blog entries about iPhone app rejections of questionable merit.

It makes me uncomfortable that those that dare call Apple out are usually dismissed. It takes high-profile iPhone developers and bloggers to finally put their virtual feet down and say “enough is enough, I’m quitting this rat race because even if you win you’re still a rat.”

Apple’s tightening of the chokehold, telling developers exactly what programming languages they can use (Objective-C, C, C++, or Javascript), and even then placing developers completely at their mercy, denying the App Store placement of what would otherwise be useful applications, is a recipe for inevitable bad PR and a peasants’ revolt. This is something I would have expected a company to have done back in the 1980s; it is woefully out of place in 2010. The irony of this, is that the Apple Computer that brought us the Apple II computers and the original Apple Macintosh was much more freedom- and hacker-friendly than today’s company.

The most discomforting thing, is that Apple is much closer to the rule than the exception. My best arguments against buying Apple’s iPhone also apply to any number of other products, most notably the Blackberry series and Microsoft’s Kin. (While Google is not exactly squeaky clean, they aren’t being nearly as restrictive in development of applications for Android-based phones such as the Droid and the Nexus One.) The most promising freedom-friendly smartphone, the Neo Freerunner, is being made in very small numbers and is disproportionately priced given its featureset.

Maybe Dan Grigsby can get Apple’s attention in ways others can’t. No one developer or blogger will be able to effect the type of change truly needed; it’s going to take a mob of angry developers to abandon Apple before they take notice.

Rotten Apple dealings, part number gee-I-lost-count

I’m combining my commentary from these three recent stoies into one post, because they are all about Apple’s latest shenanigans and I don’t want to post three in a row.

The first two are about yet more arbitrary iPhone app rejections. ZDNet’s The Apple Core blog reports on Apple taking out certain wi-fi discovery applications, on the grounds they use an undocumented interface (i.e. something Apple decided was too good to let just any old programmer use). Another one is more troubling; TechCrunch reports on the phone radiation monitoring application Tawkon and its denial.

Both of these examples have something in common: they highlight the arbitrary nature by which iPhone applcation developers can be put out of business. As it stands now, the iPhone developers are at the mercy of Apple.

With regard to wi-fi discovery, the responsible thing to do would be to open up the API (interface), properly document it, and ensure that every programmer who wishes to use it may. I’m not sure of the gory details, but this certainly smacks of something Apple would just do on a whim. At least one of the applications in question is releasing a version for jailbroken iPhones, though again I will note that jailbreaking shouldn’t even be necessary to begin with.

Tawkon actually performs a very useful function, something that really should be built into most mobile phone handsets. It’s sad, but unfortunately no big surprise, that Apple’s own interest (covering up exactly how much radio frequency emissions come from its product) trumps those of the people who wish to make money by selling such an application. Does Apple really have something to hide here? I would not be surprised if the final, Apple-approved version of Tawkon is crippled beyond usefulness.

The last article is about the iPad and Associated Press, courtesy of TechJackal. Apparently the good old AP is planning to offer a paid service to read its news articles on the iPad. Yes, the same ones available for free via the web.

The closed model of the iPad breeds greedy schemes like this of dubious merit. It’s a great deal for the AP and Apple, and a lousy deal for the people out there who have placed their trust in Apple by buying their wares. I know, it’s nothing really new. It’s sad that we have so many Apple lemmings out there willing to jump on the company’s latest offering, none of whom even care about the implications behind Apple’s unfortunate use of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) where it is clearly not needed and works to the detriment of its customers.

Shame on you, Apple. Your customers and developers deserve better than this.