[piksel] Re: [PD] Piksel'05

[Ian Smith-Heisters]

At the risk of being non-sequitor, I'd like to chip in here. I just 
caught this latest post in the thread, so many apologies if this has 
been covered or is off-topic.

Christian Klippel wrote:
>>I have often been surprised by linux developers' seemingly lack of interest
>>for anything that goes on outside their own application. The general
>>attituse seems to be that 'the other stuff is not my responsibility, so I
>>just have to blindly rely on what other coders are doing'. This is
>>specially true for video apps where everybody seems to be closing their
>>eyes for things like the lack of a unified high-quality playback-engine and
>>free hq codecs.
>>

The problem here is largely that linux developers are developing for 
fun, and thus have no obligation to take on unwanted responsibilities. 
Until these developers are compensated in some way, they'll generally do 
whatever suits their fancy; which is better than the alternative, which 
is that we don't do any work at all.

>>We should learn from the linux audio community and their effort to advocate
>>the low-latency patches which is finally in the latest kernels.
>>We not only need a video-jack but also a video-alsa!
>>

I have often thought about this, and the fact that video apps are 
generally behind audio apps in open source. I personally think there are 
two reasons for this: 1) Video requires a lot more in the way of system 
resources because of its high data rate (as compared to audio). This has 
slowed video FLOSS video development because FLOSS is generally 
developed on commodity hardware, which to this day has trouble doing 
fancy processing on video in RT. 2) (more theoretically) I think there's 
more of a tradition of technological innovation in music because music 
has always depended on technology (eg. instruments). Thus computer music 
is becoming a rather mature genre. OTOH, film has been around for about 
100 years (as opposed to millions) and hasn't yet developed as mature of 
a culture of research and innovation as music. Of course, film is by its 
very nature technological, moreso even than music. But when multimedia 
computers debuted in the early nineties, music was already set to take 
advantage of them, while film took longer, both because of the increased 
demands film places on a system, and because film hadn't yet developed a 
need for such technology.

Yes? No? Just a little musing.

-Ian