Re: MPEG2-TS activity in Bugzilla

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Alex Giladi <alex.giladi@huawei.com> wrote:
> It is codec-independent -- it's only concerned with use of MPEG-2 Transport Stream as a container.

Right, but usually there is some concrete motivation behind
introducing support codec-independent containers. I'm curious what the
concrete motivation is.

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Glenn Adams <glenn@skynav.com> wrote:
> Could you supply some reference(s) [to bugzilla entries]?

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17094
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14492#c6
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14422#c3

> Do you have any comment on the use of MPEG-2 video?

Personally, I think it would be a terrible idea to introduce an MPEG-2
video dependency to the Web platform. Browsers already support at
least one of VP8 or H.264 both of which provide better quality per bit
than MPEG-2 video, which is even more encumbered than H.264. It
doesn't make sense to add something that's of worse quality and comes
with worse encumbrances that what's already supported.

(MPEG-2 video is so encumbered that Apple, even though it ships MPEG-2
decoding in DVD Player and encoding in iDVD, keeps general MPEG-2
video support for QuickTime in a separately-priced additional product.
If recent press reports are any indication, it appears that Microsoft
is going to follow Apple and separate MPEG-2 support into a
separately-priced unit that's not part of the base edition of Windows
8.)

> In general, it is a commercial video requirement to support
> MPEG-2 video, either in PS or TS forms (or both).

It appears that in the above sentence "commercial video" is not an
euphemism for content that Hollywood requires to be wrapped in DRM,
since H.264 plus DRM already seems to be used for that case.

What sort of use case, concretely, does "commercial video" mean in the
above sentence? (I have my guesses, but I'd rather not proceed to
discuss strawmen without confirming first.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 7 June 2012 10:52:11 UTC