Abandoned Code oughtn’t be Proprietary

For my Honours final seminar I had made a few videos in MATLAB and used their default compression to reduce the animations down to a size which a reguar computer wouldn’t choke on when trying to play.  I took the videos home on a portable USB hard drive and went to check that they worked properly only to have Windows Media Player tell me that I didn’t have an appropriate codec (a piece of software that encodes and decodes a media stream) and that it would be happy to look for one for me.  I thought this would be fairly simple but Media Player told me that it couldn’t find a free codec and after a bit of reading I found that I’d have to download the Indeo 5 codec to be able to view my video.

No problem, right?  Indeo was developed by Intel and had been shipped with Windows for as long as I can remember.  Things have changed since Windows XP was released, though, and Indeo is no longer shipped by Microsoft nor owned by Intel.  Intel have sold the Indeo codec to Ligos who now charge $14.95 to download the codec which hasn’t been actively developed in years.  Charging the end user a fee to be able to use their media is completely ridiculous in my eyes; it’s the producer of the media who benefits more from compression technologies as it means smaller file sizes can be delivered using the same amount of disk space.  The end user (who may receive the file(s) on a CD) doesn’t gain a huge advantage from the compression except if they want to store millions of video files on their hard drive.

Microsoft stopped shipping the Indeo codec with Windows XP Service Pack 1.  This wasn’t a decision on the part of Indeo, who had said that they would honour Microsoft’s previous contract with Intel without changing a thing.  My guess is that Microsoft are looking to move towards their own homegrown codecs such as the various Windows Media audio and video codecs they’ve produced and that discontinuing Indeo allows them to backhandedly force media producers (whether commercial or home users with Windows Movie Maker) to use their codec which ships with Windows for free.  Microsoft have been in a bit of trouble before with the bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system and I think a case could be made here that Microsoft are engaging in the same anti-competitive behaviour.  Yes, the argument can be made that companies are able (and meant) to use any competitive edge to gain a larger share of the market but Microsoft are engaging in very dodgy tactics here.

So what’s the solution?  Open and free codecs such as Ogg Vorbis can do away with a lot of compatibility problems by allowing programmers to compile binary codecs for any operating system on any architecture. One of the hallmarks of late 1990s and early 2000s computer video was that it was next to impossible to get a Windows Media file to play on a Macintosh and Apple’s .mov movie format didn’t play well with Windows until Apple released Quicktime.  These issues have been resolved, for now, with Flip4Mac and bundles of codecs available for Linux but the proprietary nature of these codecs mean that often years are spent waiting for a simple task to be completed because it’s not a high priority for Microsoft (or any other large company) to make their software available for uses other than those which they envisage.

Computers, which are sold on the basis of making communication easier and multimedia simpler to produce, can provide major problems for those without the technical know-how to get around the issues arising from proprietary stream decoders.  It doesn’t do the companies any good to force the end users to pay a fee to access a video that someone else was responsible for creating.  How can we fulfil the ideals of user-generated web (and TV) content when the barriers to entry involve almost abandoned pieces of software with restrictions for use?  Imagine picking up a copy of the Dune II video game and being asked to buy a manual to get past the anti-piracy questions.

I am incredibly unhappy with Ligos for charging $15 for access to a piece of software that they didn’t create and don’t update.  What could possibly justify charging this fee?  The overheads for a large company hosting a codec on their website can’t be all that large to justify such a fee.  They even recognise that it’s a “legacy” codec which, to me, means that it’s not in active production and thus should be available for free.  If the Indeo codec were a book, it would be able to be legally reproduced because it’s the equivalent of being “out of print”.

In my mind, this is a clear example of how intellectual property rights for software needs to be drastically reformed in order to be fair for consumers.  Both Microsoft and Ligos are engaging in behaviour which can quite simply be described as “greedy” rather than “driven by the profit motive and engaging in honest work to improve their market share”.  The behaviour of both of these companies is shameful.