SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

https://www.smpte.org/blog/smpte-makes-its-standards-freely-accessible-openingstandards-library-to-the-global-media-technology-community

by zdw • 1 month ago

293 101 1 month ago

smpte.org

geerlingguy2• 1 month ago

I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.

happytoexplain• 1 month ago

I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.

geerlingguy2• 1 month ago

If your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite.

Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.

seanhunter• 1 month ago

There was a time when buying the Ansi C standard cost over $200 but you could get Herb Schildt’s “Annotated Ansi C Standard” for $20, which some said reflected the value he added to the process.

lars_francke2• 1 month ago

As someone working in standardization: I don't know any standardization organization where the people doing the actual work of writing standards are paid for their work. I certainly am not.

In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".

PaulHoule2• 1 month ago

Well, for ISO it is a business model. And for a lot of standards which have limited interest in a certain industry and you are probably going to spend $2000 on gear to make measurements compatible with the standard it is not so bad to spend 133 CHF on something.

On the other hand I served on a committee and wrote a technical report that costs 133 CHF and personally I'm a bit annoyed that (1) I can't send you a link to read it for free and (2) a friend of mine who worked for the US government and is the only person I ever met who knew how to do complex modelling in OWL couldn't contribute her writing to it because everything US government employees write is supposed to be public domain.

cpgxiii2• 1 month ago

Because these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less.

A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.

bborud• 1 month ago

This even extends to how some standards are written: deliberately complex and poor work just to make it frustrating and ensure a high barrier of entry. And of course there are either no test suites or testing against them costs a fortune.

This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.

kelnos2• 1 month ago

these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards

Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.

asdcplib3• 1 month ago

Once upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.

kyrra3• 1 month ago

Construction codes are still pay walled.

NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...

IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024

And there are many others.

(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

defgeneric• 1 month ago

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you think about who needs to have access to the correct and current building code or electric code or whatever for regular reference, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.

Hendrikto2• 1 month ago

You have to build your projects to these specifications, or you will be held accountable! What specifications? Oh, you will have to pay to access them.

This is essentially a protection racket. Ludicrous.

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

Back in the day when I was doing this kind of thing, we had to buy a whole load of British Standards. They are £100s each, and they each cover a small part of work. If you’re designing steel structures you need one for basic structural design, one for loads on structures, one for steel structural design, one for the steel sections themselves, one for foundation design, one for execution of steel structures, and many many more. It’s thousands of pounds.

kazinator2• 1 month ago

Sometimes standards bodies are formed by an oligarchy of industry players who have decided that their businesses would be simplified by mutual interoperability. They have no interest in lowering any bar of entry for other players though; certainly, they don't care about some hobbyist who balks at forking up $300 for a document.

kelnos2• 1 month ago

To be fair, though, $300 is a pretty low bar. Certainly for any company, but even for a decent chunk of hobbyists who are really into building something.

Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.

SideQuark• 1 month ago

Because it costs a massive amount to get standards with this technical quality. They go through meetings, have a decent amount of staff to run, organize, have conference costs (locations...), take years to get done.

Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going.

Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.

mananaysiempre• 1 month ago

I don’t know how SMPTE works, but ISO meeting participants are, famously, unpaid volunteers. Or perhaps I should rather say negatively paid, as it costs money to participate in (more than one) meeting.

Ekaros• 1 month ago

You have to fund the local national body tracking these and distribution and so on. Bigger thing back in the day of physical copies. Which involved real costs. Just imagine allowing anyone to order free paper... Only EU does that...

So then next question who should fund whole thing? Tax payers or the companies which is vast majority of users. Well self-funding organisation sounds really good for politicians. Move the costs to companies. Thus paid standards.

cyberax• 1 month ago

What the heck is SMPTE?

s1mon• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Motion_Picture_and_...

SoftTalker• 1 month ago

Didn't realize they were so broad in scope. The only thing I had heard of was "SMPTE codes" used in audio recording to sync up multiple multi-track recording machines, so that e.g. you could record 30 tracks using two 16-track recorders (with one track on each machine used for the sync). I never bothered to look up what SMPTE meant.

adrian_b• 1 month ago

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

The SMPTE standards have been very important for cinematography and television, especially for professional applications.

Their importance has decreased since the transition to digital video, when many relevant standards have been issued by other organizations, but many SMPTE standards are still important, especially regarding the formats used for distributing digital movies for movie theaters.

jonizzle• 1 month ago

But they are getting back in the game with SMPTE 2110 which is a standard that describes how to send digital media over an IP network.

qlm• 1 month ago

I learned this from the Frank Zappa song "Baby Snakes" which contains the lyrics:

They live in a ho-ho-hole

(Tiny hole)

That is usually empty

(Usually empty, tiny too)

They live by a code

(Dit dit dit dit)

That is usually SMPTE

Which stands for

Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers

dogman1050• 1 month ago

Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.

jimmygrapes• 1 month ago

I thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)

PaulHoule2• 1 month ago

Explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk9xpH5aUtk

cortesoft3• 1 month ago

I saw it and thought it was an extension to the the SMTP standard.

ElijahLynn• 1 month ago

I had the same question. I clicked on their menu About > Who is SMPTE page and it didn't define the acronym either.

Then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and I did see it in the footer: SOCIETY OF MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION ENGINEERS

Today I learned

lambdaone• 1 month ago

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid.

It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

tyre2• 1 month ago

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal.

This will only increase innovation.

bitwize• 1 month ago

APIs have not been ruled uncopyrightable. The Supreme Court found that Google's use of the Java API's was fair use; fair use is specifically a defense against infringement of a copyrighted work.

There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.

But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.

userbinator• 1 month ago

We need a SciHub for standards docs

LibGen?

Hendrikto2• 1 month ago

Last time I checked (a few years ago), you had to pay some ridiculous price (230$ iirc) to view the SQL specification. SQL!

cloud8421• 1 month ago

Off-topic, but also the title of the first album of the progressive supergroup Transatlantic.

ksec2• 1 month ago

From [1],

This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include:
Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control
Issue tracking and automation
Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring
Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release.

I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had.

And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement?

[1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...

asdcplib3• 1 month ago

can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free?

It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.

eek2121• 1 month ago

GitHub == git, which is free. You can clone the repo and push it to wherever. No comment on the rest. I am just pointing out that using GitHub for source code doesn't mean mean that code can't be easily forked or used elsewhere. I suspect GitHub is for convenience since the majority of folks using git use it.

rswail2• 1 month ago

The git part of github is a very small part of it, they are using Github issues etc which are not exportable/cross-platform.

So yes, you can git clone the repo and get the HTML, but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.

andersthuesen• 1 month ago

Remember buying the 430.10 standard pdf back in the days in order to build subreader.io's cinema integration. Nice that it is openly available now!

RossBencina3• 1 month ago

Great, now do AES and IEEE.

javawizard• 1 month ago

At least AES membership gets you free access to all of their standards, which is more than can be said for IEEE.

Source: I'm a card-carrying AES member.

tonyarkles• 1 month ago

And pretty cheap. I was a member for a year, just to get access to the entire AES67 standard. I think it was $65 for the membership at the time.

RossBencina3• 1 month ago

Indeed, I only learned this recently. There was a time when AES digital library access required an extra fee.

guerby3• 1 month ago

In France if a standard is mandated by law (like electrical home wiring) then it must be freely available.

I assume most democracies have similar laws, it's a basic right to know what laws you should follow ...

hobofan• 1 month ago

Does that actually mean "freely" (as in beer) available, or it must be able for anyone to be procurred?

I would assume that France, like many countries heavily rely on ISO standards, which in many cases cost some money. Or is it the case that those standards are not explicitly mandated, but are essentially only fulfillable by knowing the ISO standard?

erincandescent• 1 month ago

When the EU legislates compliance with a standard into law, they pay the standards body for a license covering all EU residents and citizens

guerby3• 1 month ago

In French

https://www.francenormalisation.fr/les-acteurs-de-la-normali...

If there is only knowing the norm that makes you able to follow the law that refers it then it's a "obligatory norm" and must be readable without cost.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI00004...

List of such norms in spreadhseet linked here:

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/autour-de-la-loi...

this_was_posted• 1 month ago

In the Netherlands it doesn’t quite work like that in reality. There’s a whole bunch of laws that refer to norms indirectly. In theory you could meet requirements without them but in practice it is absolutely impossible.

guerby3• 1 month ago

Interesting, could you cite one such law and norm?

otabdeveloper4• 1 month ago

Are you sure France is a democracy and not a republic?

fitsumbelay• 1 month ago

SPMTE timecode is the first tech standard I was able to understand as a young adult (which was decades ago). Standards.

fithisux• 1 month ago

Time for HW vendors to include a datasheet for everything they sell.

And this should be mandatory.

edoceo• 1 month ago

Opened up my older clothes dryer to replace the belt. Has a two-pager schematic inside. Reminded me we used to have a TV that came with similar details.

NathanielK• 1 month ago

Full pile of standards available here:

https://pub.smpte.org/doc/

There's some really neat ones all the way from film standards to digital cinema

SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

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