December 18, 2007
by sjvn01
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Dell has told me that it will be announcing later today, Dec. 19, that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs.
According to Dell spokesperson Anne B. Camden, the “Dell Inspiron 530N desktop and Inspiron 1420N notebook PCs are now available with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed.” Both of these models were part of Dell’s second wave of Ubuntu-powered PCs, which were released in June 2007.
December 18, 2007
by sjvn01
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ABI Research has just released a report that predicts that 1.2 million of what it calls Internet video devices in 2008. The leader of the pack? The Apple TV.
Everyone knows that the Apple TV
ABI sees hope ahead for both the Apple TV and Internet video devices. Two things will make this happen according to ABI. First, the firm believes that there will be a flood of new content. Some of that will come in new devices such as Vudu‘s HD (high definition) Internet player. They also believe that “consumers’ growing hunger for both user-generated and professionally produced content on the Internet could create greater demand for these new devices.”
December 15, 2007
by sjvn01
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Whether you like Microsoft one bit, you have to admit Microsoft is pretty darn bright at some thinygs–Excel, Windows XP SP 2, rolling over its competition–but when it comes to multimedia and DRM (Digital Rights Management), Microsoft is dumber than dumb. An excellent case in point is its transformation of Playsforsure into Certified for Windows Vista.
For several years, Microsoft had a multimedia/DRM campaign calls Playsforsure. Now, those playful boys from Redmond claim that it’s all grown up in to Certified for Windows Vista.
Growing up? How can Playsforsure grow-up? Microsoft killed it last year when it introduced its second rate version of an iPod: Zune. Microsoft, which had been claiming that any device that was Playsforsure could play Microsoft DRM media files, announced that its own lead playback device couldn’t play Playsforsure files. Some business moves are so boneheaded that you can’t make them up. This is one of those.
December 11, 2007
by sjvn01
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AT&T is spending serious money with Cisco to improve its Internet capabilities. Let’s just hope they’re spending enough.
To prevent our cable and DSL modems from delivering Hayes 1200-baud SmartModem-like performance, the major telecoms, such as AT&T, have been investing in serious infrastructure upgrades. In the most recent one, AT&T announced that it was buying Cisco CRS-1 core routers for 25 of its major Internet backbone sites. At $500,000 to more than $1 million per CRS-1, that’s serious mullah even for AT&T or Cisco.
What do you get for that kind of money? A single CRS-1 port, according to an independent test by Light Reading, can deliver 40 Gbit/s (gigabits per second). In another test, Light Reading was able to test two fully loaded CRS-1 chassis and the pair reached a rather stunning 1.2 Tbit/s (Terabits per second).
Now that, my friend, is fast.
I just hope it’s fast enough.
December 10, 2007
by sjvn01
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It’s good news, bad news situation when it comes to Adobe’s new Flash player for Linux.
On the plus side, Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, version identifier 9.0.115.0 was made available for Linux at the same time as Mac and Windows versions. It’s nice to see Linux not being treated as the little brother who only gets the older, hand-me down programs by a major software vendor. An even bigger win for Flash Player users, regardless of their operating system, is that its supports H.264.
H.264 is one of the two major HD (high definition) codices used on Internet multimedia broadcasts.
The other significant HD standard is Microsoft’s implementation of VC-1 in Windows Media Player. Microsoft will also be making VC-1 available in Silverlight, its cross-browser, cross-platform multimedia plug-in. Novell is working with Microsoft to bring Silverlight’s functionality to Linux in a Mono-based project called Moonlight.
Still, H.264 seems to be pulling ahead in overall popularity. H.264 is used in Apple’s QuickTime Movie file format and in HDTV in the MP4 format. It supports such less common formats as M4V, M4A, Mp4v, 3gp, and 3g2. In other words, there is going to be no shortage of HD movies, shorts and so-on for your newly augmented Adobe Flash Player.
It will, however, take a while for much of that content to appear in a format that you can get at. For example, while in theory you can play Apple QuickTime Movie films in the new Flash, getting a stream to feed into say a Firefox-based Flash player is almost impossible.
For audio, Flash now includes support for AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). This includes: AAC Main, AAC LC and SBR (aka HE-AAC). While often thought of as “Apple’s format,” it’s actually part of the MPEG-4 audio compression standard. What Flash doesn’t support is Apple’s FairPlay DRM (Digital Rights Management), so you can forget about legally playing your iTunes Store DRM-protected tunes.
Another problem is that the new Flash really demands a lot from your system. I found it to be slower than the last version in dealing with Adobe’s native Flash format, SWF. It wasn’t that big a deal, but you could tell it was there.
Where things really began to slow down was when I used it with HDTV content that I’d created myself into MP4 using the latest version of Nero 8 Ultra Edition. The official system requirements for playing 24 fps (frames per second) 480p (progressive) video is an Intel Pentium 4 2.33GHz processor, 128MBs of RAM and 64 MB of VRAM (video RAM). For 24 fps 720p, you’ll need a Pentium 4 3GHz. 128MB of RAM and 64MB of VRAM. If you want to really push the limits with 1080p, you’ll need an Intel Core Duo 1.8GHz processor, or equivalent), 128MB of RAM and a graphics card with 64MBs of VRAM.
For my tests, I used two different PCs running openSUSE 10.3. My first system was a HP Pavilion a6040n desktop PC. This is powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor. It also has 2GBs of 533MHz RAM and a 320GB SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive running at 7,200 rpm. For the display, this PC uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory. The graphic chip uses main memory for the rest of its requirements.
My second test box was a Gateway GT5622. This PC uses a 1.80GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160 processor. It has 3GB of DDR2 SDRAM (double-data-rate two synchronous dynamic random access memory), a 400GB SATA II hard drive and a DVD R/W drive. For graphics, it uses the inexpensive Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, which was set to pull 224MB of RAM from main memory to use as shared video memory.
On both systems, I was able to playback 480p at 24fps. At 720p, however, I began to see an unacceptably slow frame-rate. While some scenes with little action were still displaying at 24 fps, if there was any fast motion on the video, things dropped down to about 16 to 18 fps. As for 1080p, forget about it. The last time I saw video like this was back in the early days of video over the Internet, when just the fact that you could see any video over the Net was amazing.
One of the things I like about the Gateway GT5622’s E2160 processor, however, is that it’s both very easy to overclock and that you can really push its speed. So, after a bit of work, I cranked this PC up to a processor speed of 3GHz. Now, 720p became watchable and 1080p was not quite as good as 720p had been at the default speed of 1.8GHz.
With a good graphics card, say an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 256MB with the official NVIDIA 2D “nv” drivers, a high-performance Linux PC will do very well with Flash. However, most of us aren’t going to be replacing our HDTV sets with HDTV Flash-enabled computers any time soon. However, once Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3, which will support H.264 streaming appears sometime in the first quarter of 2008, you can expect to see a lot more, easy to access HDTV Flash content.
Come that day, you’ll also need your Linux system to be using ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). If you’re using OSS (Open Sound System) or GNOME’s ESD (Enlightened Sound Daemon), you won’t get an error message, but you won’t be hearing anything. .
The new Flash is only available for x86/32-bit Linuxes. You can download it as an archived, compressed file, .tar.gz; or as an RPM or YUM package. Ubuntu users should add the multiverse repository to their systems and then download and install flashplugin-nonfree for the updated Flash.
There are also two purely open-source Flash players. These are Gnash and Swfdec. Neither, however, incorporates H.264 support.
Adobe clearly means to claim HDTV for its Flash line of products. At the same time, Adobe has also committed itself to support Linux on the same level as Windows and Mac OS. Slow performance and all, it appears to me that Adobe Flash Player is going to become for Linux multimedia, what OpenOffice is for office software and Firefox is for Web-browsing: the application of choice for Linux users everywhere.
December 7, 2007
by sjvn01
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The Software Freedom Law Center announced on Dec. 7 that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon Communications on behalf of its clients, the two principal developers of BusyBox.
The suit alleges that Verizon has violated the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License version 2) in its fiber-optic Internet and television service, aka FiOS.
Verizon distributes Actiontec MI424WR wireless routers to FiOS customers. This router contains BusyBox, and under the terms of the GPL, Verizon is obligated to provide the source code of BusyBox to recipients of the device. According to the lawsuit, despite having been contacted by SFLC, Verizon is continuing to distribute BusyBox illegally without source code.
BusyBox is a set of tiny versions of many common Unix/Linux utilities, which are squeezed into a single small executable. By providing replacements for most of the utilities ordinary found in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc., developers get much of the expected functionality of the GNU utilities without the space requirements. Thus, the BusyBox programs are used in many–perhaps most–embedded Linux-based devices. A non-comprehensive list of devices that rely on BusyBox range from SBC (single board computers) to DJ mixing consoles to car engine computers to music servers to Wi-Fi AP (access points).
The complaint requests that an injunction be issued against Verizon and that damage and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs. A copy of the complaint, as filed Dec. 6 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available at the SFLC site in PDF format.
“Our clients licensed BusyBox under the GPL to ensure that all users of the program can access and modify its source code,” said Dan Ravicher, the SFLC‘s legal director. “Because Verizon chose not to respond to our concerns, we had no choice but to file a lawsuit to ensure that they comply with the GPL.”
The SFLC informed both Verizon and Actiontec of this violation on Nov. 16. According to Ravicher, ” Our only objective is to ensure our clients’ rights are respected, whether that requires litigation or not. In this case, if we just wanted to litigate, we could have also named Actiontec (Verizon’s upstream supplier) as a defendant, but we chose not to do so because they responded to our initial communications (as opposed to Verizon who has simply ignored us) and we are now in what we believe are productive conversations with Actiontec about their compliance.”
This Swiss-army knife of embedded Linux has been used illegally before in other devices. Monsoon Multimedia recently settled its GPL violation of BusyBox with the SFLC and BusyBox developers. On Nov. 20, the SFLC and the BusyBox developers also brought suit against Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas for violating the GPLv2. As Rob Landley, a BusyBox developer and a plaintiff in all these lawsuits said at the time about Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas, “We let companies do what they like with BusyBox on their hardware, and what we asked in return was that they let us reproduce what they’ve done with BusyBox on our hardware. That’s the deal embodied in the GPL.”
This makes the fourth GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley. The case against Monsoon Multimedia was settled out of court in October, with Monsoon agreeing to remedy its prior violation, ensure future compliance and financially compensate the plaintiffs.
A version of this story was first published in Linux-Watch.