John wrote:
>Maybe that's OK ... but its probably good to reflect on what
>the future holds when we go down the path of "embrace and
>extend" with MP4-SA. There's really nothing stopping anyone
>from putting out an MP4-SA implementation that has dozens of
>useful, non-compliant features, and making that version
>ubiquitious -- content will use the features, and the control
>of the standard leaves MPEG the organization and becomes
>closer to how Microsoft and AOL jointly determine what the
>"standard" subset of HTML is at any given time ...
I want to second this point very strongly. The work that John and
his collaborates have done on sfront is admirable not only in
its technical excellence, but because they have chosen to
adhere to the spec rather than improve it in ways that are clearly
better. Of course there's deficiences in the spec, but IMHO it's
really better to maintain the standard than to "improve" it in
many incompatible directions.
In the future, if there is widespread support for amending the
SAOL specification in a way that is acceptable to all the major
vendors, than this can be done through the normal MPEG
process. But I don't want to give the impression that this is
something that should be done lightly or incrementally -- to make
individual decisions for individual implementations is a path
that, as John says, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the
standard and the attendant benefits of having a strong standard.
Implementations should not try to distinguish themselves by
having a "better version of SAOL," but by implementing the
SAOL specification in a way that is faster, friendlier, better-quality
where allowed, part of a richer package, inclusive of a better
user interface, etc. This is the idea of having a standard, and
I think it's somewhat different than the implementation process
that has traditionally governed the computer-music field, which
is somewhat more casual.
Best,
-- Eric
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 28 2002 - 11:46:34 EST