An open letter to the digital video/codec industry:
Dear Assclowns:
May you all burn in eternal hellfire.
Sincerely,
JC Mann
I borrowed a digital video camera so that I could record my son's talent show act. It was a cheap, $100, no-name device, but it was better than nothing at all. I recorded the act without any problems. I brought the camera home and plugged it into my computer using the "specially designed" USB cable (Yes, you special-cable-connector-designin'-assclowns are next).
I opened the .mov file to view my masterpiece. QuickTime started playing the video immediately...sans video. While I listened to the audio, QuickTime presented me with a window containing a completely white canvas. Thanks QT. Good work. Onto other players. MPlayer? Same thing. I tried VLC, and it worked...but not without spewing tons of warning messages about the codec! Grinning like an idiot, I watched my son's act in all its splendor, rendered in grainy low-resolution video accompanied by tinny mono audio. What an age we live in.
It's hard to imagine what goes on at these big technology companies that produce our wonderful consumer electronics.
| tech-lead: | “OK people, how are we gonna store the video for our new camcorder? We need ideas.” |
| new guy: | “We could use MPEG. It's used in tons of places: DVDs, HD transmission, HD-DVDs, and Blue Ray. It's kind of become the de facto standard, so the chip sets for encoding and decoding have become a commodity.” |
| |
| awkward glances |
| |
| tech-lead: | “OK, we need ideas people.” |
| engineer 1: | “I've just finished developing my own codec.” |
| tech-lead: | “Fantastic. License?” |
| engineer 1: | “Oh, it's all our intellectual property.” |
| engineer 2: | “How well does it compress?” |
| engineer 1: | “Sometimes a little better than MPEG. I pretty much took the MPEG algorithm and tweaked it.” |
| tech-lead: | “Software compatibility?” |
| engineer 1: | “I've written a plug-in for Windows Media Player.” |
| tech-lead: | “So, it will only work with Windows?” |
| engineer 1: | “Well, if they're running Vista with the latest OS patches.” |
| tech-lead: | “Wait, what about other OS's?” |
| engineer 2: | “What other OS's?!” |
| |
| laughter |
| |
| engineer 1: | “I guess it could be reverse engineered, but by the time it is, we'll be using a different codec.” |
| tech-lead: | “Right. Of course. It's always worked for us in the past.” |
| engineer 2: | “Is the plug-in secure?” |
| engineer 1: | “Well, not really. It could allow a hacker to execute arbitrary code.” |
| tech-lead: | “Whoa-whoa. That sounds bad.” |
| engineer 1: | “I'm thinkin', when was the last time a hacker was able compromise a plug-in for Windows Media Player?” |
| tech-lead: | “Good point.” |
