Proprietary Media Protocols xp

Many file formats out there are bad. Some include Macromedia's, RealAnything, Quicktime, and anything created by Adobe except PostScript. Here's why.

Proprietary protocols, to be frank, crush Capitalism. Everything we stand for, from a free market to open competition, to anti-monopolistic practices, if you allow yourself to make a file in a language you have to pay someone to even be allowed to write, then you have just moved the world a little further from capitalism and a little closer to feudalism. Why would anyone be foolish enough to pay someone to allow them to create things? I don't know, but it keeps happening, so here's the scoop, would-be web designers.

Quicktime: First of all quicktime, while they do make a nice player for the Mac, the later versions of their movie file making programs create a proprietary version of Quicktime that can't be played on most any operating system other than Macintosh.
Macromedia: Macromedia is one of the nicer ways to make a web page out there. Sprite based, interactive, moving, very compressed, with lots of cool tricks like a "loading' dialog, and some really fun games can be made from it. So why is it bad? It's becoming proprietary. Seriously proprietary. They will no longer tell anyone what sequence of bits defines a sprite, or a movie, or a mouse event. They want to force web designers to buy their program, and prevent anyone else from competing in a fair arena.
In addition, Flash is trying to force people to use Microsoft. They recently released a file format called 'application/x-director' and made very sure to only write programs that will display it on Microsoft platforms (and MacOS but they're expensive). Why was there no driver written for Mozilla? Why no viewer program for XWindows? They did it for their 'Flash' format (which does exactly the same thing) but for some strange rea$$$on, Macromedia won't write plugins for a browser that is easier to write plugins for: Mozilla. Or a windowing system that has clearer documentation than Microsoft: XWindows.
Hah, you say, I'll just make Flash animations and everyone can view my stuff! Good idea. Great idea! Flash is even an open protocol. That means I could write a Flash player, you could write a Flash file creation tool, and Macromedia can take their X-Director and sit on it until they make plugins that aren't trying to force us to use Microsoft.
Adobe: Hi, I'd like to scan some documents, using text recognition to save space and allow readers to search the online documents. What's that? It's hard to do? Well at least there's a program someone is working on to do it. But I need more functionality, because my scanner messes up lighting, because I need to recognize handwriting (sometimes not even humans can do that!) or because I just can't take time to check for the few errors it has to be perfect!!!
Well, then you could try for one of the hefty Commercial products. Notice their nice policy about charging an annual maintenance fee on the assumption that the program they wrote is going to break.
But even still! I need to create pdf documents.
Well
First you need a Microsoft operating system like any good little drone, so if your business doesn't belong to Microsoft yet, you will have to convince them to become so or fail at your job. That's $200, or actually more like $1,500 for a business edition.
How nice! Adobe Acrobat Capture starts at $400 (That's $399.00 you heathen!) But wait, what if you have Windows NT? Obviously since NT is an easier operating system to write programs for, you should pay an extra $1,500 to buy the latest version of Windows Business Server since Adobe products require XP or greater instead of just using what works. Cha-ching!
So you're capturing and scanning and everything's working, then you hit copy #20,000. Guess what? The Adobe program stops working! Is this some insidious virus? Or perhaps an unchecked bug? No! It's completely intentional. You have to purchase (for the low low price of $250 each) what they call 'pak's of 20,000 copies. Of course they aren't sending you the virtual paper, in fact all they're sending you is the authorization to unlock your program again. So in other words, you're paying them $250 to give their permission. That might require them to lift a finger, but that's one expensive finger lift.
This is terrible! I don't want software that makes me give money away for free! Oh, good choice me. I'll just buy their product with an unlimited copy license. I'll just buy their unlimited copy Cluster edition for.... 4 THOUSAND dollars. That's $4000.00.
Adobe is like that. The entire company seems bent on squeezing the last penny out of struggling businesses ignorant of its parasitic ways. They had one good idea: postscript. To this day it remains a hallmark document format. But soon after, they changed to their proprietary PDF format, which is basically postscript plus compression, and now you can't buy a product from Adobe that doesn't generate PDF format. In addition, they try to extort graphic artists (Adobe Photoshop ($609), Adobe Illustrator ($400)). I mean, sure art can be lucrative field, but how can they justify charging that much money for that product; even if it is quality, it's not that good. The Gimp is proof positive of that.
RealMedia: You may have noticed I ordered these from least to worst. This is the worst. I have spent countless hours fighting the great beast that is this company, who somehow managed to exploit the stupidity of just not knowing to make their files the standard format across the Internet.
I'm sure you've heard of "RealPlayer" before. The most horrible, buggy, ad clogged media player in the world, yet you still keep coming back to it, day after day. Why? Because every streaming media radio station uses RealMedia's proprietary format. Every downloadable movie trailer is available in RealMedia's format, often none else. You look for songs, movies, streams, and so forth, and everywhere are the claws of RealMedia.
Let me tell you a story. I was working on the computers in a music lab. That semester the lab had gotten permission to use a huge server, to store their CD collection in online format. One catch: the program that runs the server is this little sweetie called RealServer. It's basically an HTTP server with a few extra tricks thrown on, except for one thing. You can only download RealMedia files from it.
Heaven forbid it downloads another movie file format, or a text file. So we had all this space, but as a consequence of the stupidity of the people who bought (yes, they paid money for) RealServer's restriction, I had to further inconvenience the school by purchasing RealStudio, a program to convert mp3 files to RealMedia format. (It can't go from rm to mp3 though. How about that...). Then, after adding another 10 minute step to every uploading of every CD thanks to RealMedia, we also had to install the ad-ware RealPlayer on every computer in the lab.
These wasted hours were compounded by the fact that RealPlayer is broken. Every other hour or so, it would completely freeze up one of the computers and the person on duty had to go walk over and hard reboot the computer. There's another 2-5 minutes wasted for both us and students trying to listen.
Let me tell you another story. Once there was a file format out there called mp3. Different versions of it were built for video, audio and streaming media (like radio stations.) It was a revolutionary audio compression method, that made it possible to distribute media files on the Internet.
Real came in, and copied everything that mp3/mpeg did. They made the compression a little better, and locked the changes they made to the protocol deep in their proprietary little vaults. Then somehow they convinced every server on the Internet that their format was better, more standard (proprietary is never standard. That's the point, to confuse standards.) and the Way of the Future.
So now when I go looking for mp3 classical radio, guess what? It ain't there most of the time. When I go looking for level 1 mpegs, what do I find? RealMedia is the Way of the Future (and also not working on my computer, but that must be my fault since the Way of the Future can't be a shoddy product). And I checked back at the music lab, after getting laid off due to the educational budget cuts; they are back to using mp3. I wish I could help them, but RealMedia did damage, lost hours, wasted money, that would take a lot of work to fix, and frankly I have to spend my time looking for a paid job.

You're playing with fire if you try to deal with a company that operates on such shady business practices as incompatible file formats, lying about standards, and under-the-table monopolies with Microsoft. Expect frequent "reminders" for updates (i.e. buy what you already paid for again), loss of secure information, and unavailability of the program that creates that "old" file format. Honestly, I say until the attitude of the corporate world changes, we're going to be in for some turbulent years. For media, and for the world.

Proprietary Media Protocols xp

Journal started Feb 7, 2002