Patently Absurd - Acacia claims ownership of all digital media

Patently Absurd - that's the title of Dan Rayburn's piece this week on StreamingMedia.com. 


Acadia's approach has been to go first after adult content companies and internet radio stations, but they are starting to send nasty-grams to Fortune 1000 companies as well.  You might think it's ridiculous, and it is.  Just like SCO's lawsuits against everyone they can think of in their claims that Linux is a) theirs; b) bad; c) a threat to national security; d) unconstitutional.  They are ridiculous but they are still a threat that needs to be faced and dealt with.  Pretending they do not exist will not  make them go away. 

Mozilla can play WindowsMedia via ActiveX!

Netscape and Mozilla appear to support the WindowsMedia Player ActiveX control!  When Microsoft stopped providing a plugin for Windows Media (which is required for use of any browser except for Internet Explorer), anyone using Windows Media and wanting to support all Web users had to code their pages and encode their media for the last plugin available - version 6.4. It's an ever more important issue these days, since users are switching to the Mozilla browser in droves. Thankfully, the Mozilla developers have taken steps to do what Microsoft would not - make Windows Media work for people who've discovered that there's a better alternative to IE. According to this helpful document on Netscape's DevEdge site:


Thanks to Steve Mack for pointing this out on the StreamingMedia.com Advanced discussion list! 

Scalable streaming video encoding

Encoding hundreds of hours streaming video from a conference or other major event can be a monumental task that takes  months to accomplish.  But attendees want to have the proceedings available within days of the event, not months.  That was the problem the folks handling the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference had to solve. 

Jim Baker writes a great (and finely detailed) piece on DV.com about the enterprise-scale encoding farm they built for the WWDC.  When you talk about scalability, one-off oriented desktop encoding solutions break down and new workflow processes and tools are needed.   With the scalable process Baker's team developed, they reduced the total encoding time for the conference from last year's three months to a blazing-fast two weeks. 

Open source TV

Want a TiVo-like box that you can actually control, free of DRM, forced ads, and monthly fees?  As noted by Dan Gillmor:  the open-source Linux-based MythTV PVR project looks awfully cool, if you've got the time and energy to build it.