Wednesday, February 6, 2002

The Quick and the Bad: Got some push-back for lumping QuickTime in with Real. My bad. As Bill Clinton once said (but only once), that was wrong. QuickTime comes a lot closer to the ideals listed below than it gets credit for. I'm hoping a QuickTime guru can jump in and put some words in my mouth here, to save me the research time. Meanwhile let me just credit the openness that the QT people have built into both the encoding and decoding sides, among other generousities. Now, a clarification. Maybe I'm an excessive idealst here, but I believe the way we transmit and receive stuff should be as open as possible. Usable, accessible, unencumbered with somebody's ownership. I think that's what makes infrastructure. I also know you don't get progress in many areas -- maybe most areas -- unless somebody is motivated to make money. But at a certain point you need to make a choice to let some of the ownership go if you want something to become ubiquitous. There's a balance in there somewhere. I get nearly zero sense of that from Real. I get a lot of it from Apple. And QuickTime is a great example. 11:58:35 PM    comment []

Suckage explained:In Half Priced Whine, Brian Lenihan gives me some heavy shit for saying Real sucks. (Excuse me while I close the unwanted XCam2 and RealPlayer 8 Plus pop-under ads that showed up when I went visiting the Real site to pick up the URL for the Real link in the last sentence. Okay.) First, I pointed to the wrong page in the piece that set Brian off. It was an error in the outine rules I used when I wrote that page (now corrected). Still learning. Here's the right page. I think it lays out my position fairly well. Here's a deeper point. Real, like AOL and Microsoft (and Apple with QuickTime), wants to own the means by which we transmit and receive music and video. Nothing wrong with that. It's just at variance with what the Net is fundamentally about. As I've said before (here, here, here, here and here), the Net's infrastructure embodies three virtues: Nobody owns it Everybody can use it Everybody can improve it That's why MP3 is so popular as a file format for audio, and why it will kick ass for streaming until the Fraunhofer people get all proprietary about it and Ogg Vorbis moves to the fore. I'm not a free software or open source moonie. I know the strengths and weaknesses of both, and of proprietary commercial software. And I'm happy to be using the latter right now. Mostly what free/open software and protocols and codecs create is the infrastructure on which business can be built. That's why the Net wasn't produced by Microsoft and AOL, even though both benefit from it. We need open, transparent means for moving stuff around the Net. We have it with HTTP, XML, HTML, SOAP, and MP3. We don't have it with the Real codecs. They're owned by Real. I have friends in broadcasting that tell me they're real good codecs, especially at the lower bit rates. But to transmit and recieve Real's own streams, you need Real's own servers and clients. That's lock-in and lock-out. When nearly the whole broadcasting industry radiates only over Real and Windows Media, that sucks because it fails to leverage the full virtues of the Net, which give Webcasters and listeners some choices about the servers and clients they use. I'm not alone in my sympathies here, either. Not long after one of my rants, I got an email from a Web broadcaster. I didn't run it at the time, because I'd already given Real a hard enough time. But since I'm asked to make a case here, I just posted it. As for talking to people from Real, I've done it before, though I don't remember names. I hope I get a chance to buttonhole Rob Glaser when he's at PC Forum, though I'm not hopeful about changing his views, which seem pretty set. My bottom line complaint, again, is that Real not only locks me in, but forces me to use crashy software that doesn't work very well on my preferred platforms. To me, that sucks. 2:22:06 PM    comment []

Degrees of convenience: Nobody has found a way, either in standalone or on a browser, to duplicate the tuning conveniences that showed up on radios way back in the Twenties. I'm talking about dials and preset buttons. Worse, even the radio manufacturers forgot about it for a couple decades after digital tuning showed up, when they substited rocker switches (and buttons) for dials and made it all but impossible to preset stations at all. The best I've seen so far is iTunes simple directory of stations. I hate it, but it's handy. The problem is, the user has no control over it. What's in that directory is up to Apple. They do a good job, but not as good as they might if listeners could also contribute listings,or if the listings were editable by listeners. Dave Ely points out that you can listen to WUNC in iTunes. If you have your MP3 playback defaults set up to favor iTunes, it will happen automatically when you click on the Shoutcast link here. Then you can hit the "+" symbol on the lower left corner of your iTunes window and create a new set of listings for stations Apple leaves out of the Radio Tuner. But that's a workaround of a missing feature. 10:41:50 AM    comment []

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