FSTDT Forums
Community => Science and Technology => Topic started by: The Illusive Man on May 05, 2012, 12:35:25 am
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17924190 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17924190)
The sales ban covers the Xbox 360 games console, Windows 7 system software, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
It follows a ruling that Microsoft had infringed two patents necessary to offer H.264 video coding and playback.
A US court has banned Motorola from enforcing the action until it considers the matter next week.
The handset maker is in the process of being taken over by Google.
GREAT GOGGLY MOOGLY 2012 could be exciting after all! Let the patient war carnage continue! I honestly hope the legal expenses and fees reach at least 1 trillion. All the tech companies involved in creating the ongoing patent cluster fuck deserve to bleed out.
Here is some background on what the legal case is about:
http://www.techspot.com/news/48344-judge-favors-motorola-over-microsoft-in-xbox-360-patent-case.html (http://www.techspot.com/news/48344-judge-favors-motorola-over-microsoft-in-xbox-360-patent-case.html)
I must note that I agree with Microsoft on one point, Google is trying to force everyone into using their own “web video codec” webm (VP8 video codec + Ogg Vorbis audio codec in the Matroska container format!). This is terrible because Webm is terrible for handling video, http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377).
Quotheth Jason Garrett-Glaser (the current primary x264 developer and also an ffmpeg developer), upon review the spec itself:
AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.