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• Internecine Legal Threats

  1er juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Legal/Ethical

  FFmpeg and associated open source multimedia projects such as xine, MPlayer, and VLC have long had a rebel mystique about them ; a bunch of hackers playing fast and loose with IP law in order to give the world the free multimedia experience it deserved. We figured out the algorithms using any tools available, including the feared technique of binary reverse engineering. When I gave a presentation about FFmpeg at Linuxtag in 2007, I created this image illustrating said mystique :

  
  
  

  It garnered laughs. But I made the point that we multimedia hackers just press on, doing our thing while ignoring legal threats. The policy has historically worked out famously for us– to date, I seem to be the only person on the receiving end of a sort-of legal threat from the outside world.

  Who would have thought that the most credible legal threat to an open source multimedia project would emanate from a fork of that very project ? Because that’s exactly what has transpired :

  
  
  Click for full threat
  

  So it came to pass that Michael Niedermayer — the leader of the FFmpeg project — received a bona fide legal nastygram from Mans Rullgard, a representative of the FFmpeg-forked Libav project. The subject of dispute is a scorched-earth matter involving the somewhat iconic FFmpeg zigzag logo :

  Original 2D logo		enhanced 3D logo

  To think of all those years we spent worrying about legal threats from organizations outside the community. I’m reminded of that time-honored horror trope/urban legend staple : Get out ! The legal threats are coming from inside the house !

  I’m interested to see how this all plays out, particularly regarding jurisdiction, as we have a U.K. resident engaging an Italian lawyer outfit to deliver a legal threat to an Austrian citizen regarding an image hosted on a server in Hungary. I suspect I know why that law firm was chosen, but it’s still a curious jurisdictional setup.

  People often used to ask me if we multimedia hackers would get sued to death for doing what we do. My response was always, “There’s only one way to know for sure,” by which I meant that we would just have to engage in said shady activities and determine empirically if lawsuits resulted. So I’m a strong advocate for experimentation to push the limits. Kudos to Michael and Mans for volunteering to push the legal limits.

• doc/ffmpeg : restore location of stray passage

  23 janvier 2021, par Gyan Doshi

  doc/ffmpeg : restore location of stray passage
  Added in 88fc1438c69, this passage was separated from its original
  
  context over the years with unrelated entries sandwiched in between.
  

  • [DH] doc/ffmpeg.texi

• Music Video Idiosyncrasies

  18 juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  So I’m watching a fairly recent music video for a song named "XXXO" from an artist named M.I.A. when I’m suddenly assaulted by this imagery :

  
  
  

  ... and I enter nervous convulsions. You see, while this might seem to be an odd video effect to the casual viewer, to a multimedia hacker, it appears to be deliberately antagonistic. To anyone who has written a video codec, this scene looks like an entire casserole of video bugs, combining creeping plane offsets errors, chroma problems, and interlacing havoc. The craziest part is to realize that this is probably some kind of standard video effect / filter type. Upon a repeat viewing, I realized that the entire video sort of looks like an amateur video editor’s first week using video software.

  Elsewhere in the video, a YouTube-style video frame vortex highlights the proceedings. I guess I need to come to terms with the fact that the ubiquitous player frame is just part of the digital Zeitgeist now :

  
  
  

  Vintage Video Strangeness
  I’m a long-time music video junkie but I have a tendency of examining them entirely too closely. I first saw Paula Abdul’s video for "Cold-Hearted" when I was just starting to understand multimedia technology and how it interacted with emerging home computers. Imagine how confused I was when I tried to make sense of the actions performed by our eMaestro "Chuck" whom Paula has instructed to "hit it". First, he hits a key followed by 3 quick strikes on a second key :

  
  
  

  Then, the "start music" action is apparently bound to a particular key on the electronic keyboard :
  
  

  
  
  

  Which kicks off the electronic metronome on the computer. Each identical-sounding beat quizzically maps to a different frequency transform :

  
  
  a one...
  
  and a two...
  
  and a three...
  

  I had no trouble believing things up to this point. But even though I didn’t understand what was going on with that frequency transform, I knew that it must have had something to do with the audio. And if the audio was the same, the visualization ought to be the same. Though, to be fair, I will concede that the first and third ticks pictured bear some mutual resemblance.

  Anyway, the software is probably real even if the keyboard interaction was stylized. Can anyone identify the software ? What about the computer ? This is perhaps the best view the video gives us :

  
  
  

  So, remember, don’t base your understanding of technology — or anything, really — on stylized media representations. Don’t even get me started on the movie "Sneakers." That had me confused about cryptography and computer security for many years.