Video Nightmare

Feature: 20 Years after Video came to computing its still a proprietary mess
Idea:If you thought audio was bad take a look at what has happened to video on PC's + the Web
Games, animation and video are inextricably mixed in the computing world. In May of this year Information Week has a special article devoted to how video and other rich media are providing ever wider business opportunities. They cite how it has been used on their site to increase traffic and reader participation. But, gaming and animations, and even bitmap video go back to the mainframe era of computing in the late 1960's to the early 1970's. However as one can see from the historical accounts proprietary and business advantage were strong bedfellows right from the beginning and have stunted rich media usage. Unfortunately, the mess persists.

40 years later and there are dozens of video formats (or containers because many include audio as well); but 5-8 principal A/V containers (see here for the full list). There are also dozens of Media Players (again with 5-8 principal players) - all duking it out for customer allegiance as the following table shows:

As one can see video processing and support is a mess.

Look at all the gaps, P for partial support, no audio, and just no support whatsoever abounds. I was particularly disappointed with the Adobe Media Player. This was launched early this year as a demo of Adobe's new cross platform AIR technology; yet its support of some of the most popular and heavily used Video formats is laughable. The irony is that Linux, through Xine, has the best support for all the popular Media formats.

I have included the compatibility tests of Adobe Flash Encoder and Premiere Elements program, as examples of the problems that designers and developers encounter when bringing video to heir Web and program designs. Adobe is selling ross platform design - yet falling short on full support for all of the basic video formats. However, Adobe is not alone as anyone using Microsoft's latest, Visual Studio and Expression Suite, can attest to. In general, proprietary runs rampant in RIA-Rich Interface Application development.

In fact, I had fully expected to see support nearly across the board by all of the major media players for all of the major video formats. Sure the media players only work on their own operating systems (notably Apple Quicktime out does Microsoft Media Player by running in Windows) but that was to be expected. At least these media tools would work with all of the major formats. False hope.

And it only gets worse. The newest MPEG4 formats, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2) and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) (MPEG-4 Part 10)are really chaotic. As the table implies there is only partial support for MPEG4 split along security, access, and performance lines. Yet in the era of Web 2.0 and RIA-Rich Interface Applications one would think issues like these should have been settled long ago.

40 years and counting, and vendor proprietary should not be one of the major issues in the video marketplace. Time to demand better of Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and others.