Project announcement + invitation to participate : new, opensource video editor TCME

[MfA]

They were asking for other developers to help, which given the rather extreme control and more importantly exclusive non reciprocal rights the QPL gives to a very small subset of those developers warranted a small warning.

A license is a contract, and it deserved a little more carefull consideration on which to choose ... this thread while turning a bit too hostile did help in that regard.

[jkwarras]

AS far as I'm concerned, as an independent filmmaker, I can only see good things about an open-source NLE system. I'm sick of all the bad things that commercial products brings to users:

1) Bad support: Users are never see as a user, but as an annoying person that always ask new things ans complaints (anyone ever tried the Adobe Premiere Forums? or adobe premiere support?). Usually thepeople that are there to help you don't know much more than you do about their products.

2) Limitations: MOst know NLE products have non supported features just for commercial reasons. For ex. one of the most discussed questions right know in the digital NLE world is the firewire port. Theoretically this can be used to transfer even HDCAM to a PC. There's no need to buy an expensive NLE video card (as Avid), etc.. Ok, you need much more and the best and quickest HD to handle that, but you still save a lot of money. Right now it's not possible but in the future this will be, for sure. One of the main advances right now is that DVCPRO50 (a DV evolution from Panasonic) which brings 50Mbps at a 3.3:1 ratio (very similar to a Digital Betacam) is already possible to be transfered via firewire to a Mac using a converter and directly supported by Final Cut Pro. One year before this will just have been denied by every commercial NLE platform. Why? Because it has many commercial issues: if you don't need an expensive editing card, products like Adobe Premiere will lose money from their "partners" agreements (they have agrements with a lot of third-party editing cards). A lot of users are asking Premiere to support DVCPRO50 throught firewire, to enter it into the PC world, but do theybother to listen to this? No.

The same applies to a lot of other things. I'm talking about tpremiere because is one of the most well-known. In the latest professional version (a copy of Final Cut Pro), they removed the EDL support and replaced by another "similar" thing, that just a few post-production firms support. I don't see the user benefit from that. Add this feature if you want, but don't remove the older one.

And so on, and so on.. There's too much profit involved (which I respect, they're firms and that's normal to make money from their work) but users are just sufferinf from that behaviour.

As a potential user I can only see this project as heaven on hearth :) I mean, I don't really know if the NLE part of the project is to really create a complex system or just to allow some basic stuff (fadings, croos-disolves, etc...), but whatever it is going to be, i see it as an excellent thing. Good luck!

[ChristianHJW]

Short announcement :

After some internal discussion, we more or less decided that the QPL license is actually no good option for us, for various reasons. Sorry about the confusion, we maybe didnt check that well enough before making the announcement.

Please allow me to express a bing thanks to MfA, followed by my sincere apologies for my harsh reaction on his criticism. He was pointing us to the fact that the QPL license basically doesnt really prevent us from forks, but on the other hand will make us look like we plan to sell the software, because originally the trolltech intentions behind making this license were to be able to commercialize any changes that were applied to QT by 3rd party developers.

We herewith repeat, however, that we have no intentions to sell this software, or make any other commercial use from it. Therefore, and as the QPL license wont really help us a lot against 3rd parties forking from the project, we currently consider the follwing options :

- Make the project closed source, but release binaries as freeware
- Release the sourcecode without any license form, so that it is protected by the general copyright
- Create our own 'Corecodec Public License'
- Use the GPL, and trust in the support of the community if my paranoid worst case scenario would happen

Other than that, we'd be happy about some constructive input from the community on this matter, other than all the stupid flaming from the usual matroska haters/flamers ....

[bilu]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
- Use the GPL, and trust in the support of the community if my paranoid worst case scenario would happen I agree with this license for the reasons I said above.
GPL forces everyone to release the source of every modification you make if your modified software ever goes public, commercially or not.

It's enough to avoid getting locked out, although the BSD licensing has proven that a community would rather improve the open-source software than to abandon it and use commercial software based on the same BSD code. Otherwise BSDs would be dead a long ago. :rolleyes:

My vote goes for GPL :)

Bilu

[mf]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
[b]Other than that, we'd be happy about some constructive input from the community on this matter, other than all the stupid flaming from the usual matroska haters/flamers ....
Why would you think that even came to be?

[alexnoe]

Hit dogs will bark? :sly:

[Koepi]

Originally posted by mf
Why would you think that even came to be?

Well, this is just perfect advertisment (hm. someone into marketing here?) as usual to get "talked about" again. But this doesn't matter anymore, right? The license will be as it always was (something around GPL, maybe LGPL - i'm positive this was intended right from the start), but you can make a little FUD to get the name branded into people's minds.

Koepi

[mf]

The funny thing is that Chris says it like "anyone would want the same", while I have seen zero opinions that reflect his on this matter.

[bilu]

@Koepi

I agree with you. To quote a ChrisHJW post on this same thread:

"But you other people, do you really believe that also ? Have we ever give you the faintest impression we did matroska to earn money with it ? Is it the professionalism and passion we are putting into this project that makes you believe that ?"

So I need to ask to the Matroska team:

Have this community ever give the faintest impression of abandoning open-source projects for closed ones? :sly:

When I'm referring to this community I'm thinking in a larger one. We all know how much representative it is. And as I said before, even companies like Real or On2 realize that. So you have nothing to be afraid of, the rest of the world would probably react the same way :)

EDIT: When a project can't trust it's audience, it can't expect to be trusted either.


Bilu

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by bilu So I need to ask to the Matroska team: Have this community ever give the faintest impression of abandoning open-source projects for closed ones? :sly:
EDIT: When a project can't trust it's audience, it can't expect to be trusted either. Bilu .. huh ? my worst case scenario, to repeat this again, is that any large entity outside of this community would fork the project and remove all MKV related code, as they might see a disturbing factor in it. Sounds pretty paranoid, i know. But somehow, dont know why, i still have a bad feeling about using the GPL for this project. All rational arguments tell me GPL is the best, but this feeling doesnt go away, for whatever reason.

When i say we trust on the community, its about how you all would back up the project in case my worst case scenario would become true, thats about it.

Lets stop this better now, as the discussion is being looked at as blatant advertising again, and of course from the same people. The invitation to participate is out, we wont repeat it anymore. Next time you hear from us we will tell you what license we finally choose, how the scripting will look, and maybe we will have some working code already. So, lets say in about 4 - 9 months from now ;) ....

[bilu]

@ChrisHJW

One last remark: if you could choose a closed source product with less features than a free and open-source alternative, would you do it? ;)

Less features = Less audience

That's what would happen if a project removed MKV without adding some other REALLY GOOD features that would make you even think of it :)

And even that REALLY GOOD features can be implemented in open-souce, right? ;)

Look at the Samba project for example. Stop being paranoid :D


Bilu

[mf]

If someone added MP4 code and removed MKV code, it'd have to be licensed under GPL anyway, so you can merge the MP4 code back into the original codebase. You then have a product that does both MP4 and MKV, so more people will use it than the MP4-only thing :D. Oh wait, you guys are afraid of the MPEG-LA, so you don't want to merge back... :rolleyes:

[bond]

i think we all should be very thankfull that avery lee released his tool (one of the greatest open source tools every made maybe) under the GPL and realise what this meant to the community!!!

without this cyrius would have maybe never started in adding ogm and matroska support to it (and not to forget release a new tool, which noone accused of "evil forking the source") and the success story of these two containers would have maybe never happened the way as it was

of course all the work was done mainly by individuals but never forget the very important role of the GPL!

and of course noone can be forced to release his code under GPL but if someone does it, it should be respected even more!


btw about the fear someone could delete all matroska code...
why should someone do this? the result would be only that someone comes with a backup made before the "evil hacking" (thats even not much work if cvs is used)
-> result: the tool would be the same as before and the evil guy could be kicked from accessing the cvs

i doubt that anyone seriously would do something like that!

[bond]

hell, chris i think i told you already a thousand times that :D

mp4 is not limited to a specific range of codecs!
->
the mpeg-4 standard explicitely specifies how to put every codec you want into the mp4 container:
that way its already possible to put vorbis and vobsub into mp4!
thats not a hack!!!

also mp4 is not a subset of mov!
->
a small part of mp4 is based on the technology apple developed for mov (mainly the moov atom, which is one of "hundreds") but extended and changed it very much
mp4 offers much more possibilities than mov: for example show me how you can put things in mov like i did with creating a dvd menu in mp4...

if mp4 is 2 meters tall, mov is about 10 centimeters :D
hm thats enough "mine is bigger than yours" for now ;)

[avih]

@chris,
the GPL would be a good choice imho.

avih

[Neo Neko]

GPL would be nice. But any license that keeps the source open to the public at large but restricts big business use of it would be fine. Actually the GPL or l-GPL sould be more tha fine. If Gstreamer is going to be used it should be used at least in part for both the input and output framework. In this way any format that Gstreamer could support and might support this editor would support. Including *kof*MP4*kof*. So no worries about it getting forked.

It should probably be laid out something like this.

1. Gstreamer for basic IO and compression.
2. A scripting language "Gsynth" that could be used much as AVIsynth.
3. The editor or NLE script which could be a superset of "Gsynth".
4. The GUI.

This would keep the program as flexible as possible and would benefit the community in a large way. Not to mention the developers of the editor. It would aleviate the worries of forking and in a round about way alleviate the worries about integrating formats heavily laded with IP and copyright. MP4 input pligins might be as Xvid binaries now are. Not fully legal. But not hard to find.

[bilu]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
MP4 input pligins might be as Xvid binaries now are. Not fully legal. But not hard to find. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=425298#post425298

:D


Bilu

[Wilbert]

Any updates? Did you guys actually start with this editor?

[Sirber]

Could be cool to keep mkvtoolnix, since RealAnime uses it for mkv management.

[multicone]

From #matroska, irc.corecodec.com :

<ChrisHJW> the whole world waiting for TCME
<ChrisHJW> if they unban me, i will reply :D

[spyder]

There is currently no work on this project. There was a small amount of stuff done initially but it died out due to a lack of hands. I'm currently coding a personal project which could be reused in such an app someday. As far as I know there is not much planned for TCME at the current moment.

[Shinigami-Sama]

aw thats suck... I was looking forwards to this. To bad I don't know any c/++ or asm, else I;d help