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Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

> There was a lot of hand-waving around the fact I was writing about the sRGB spec without having seen it, and a lot of the content in my post on that topic was inferred from information on Wikipedia and in the draft spec for sRGB.

What a ridiculous situation and a great example of why specs should be open.

(Speaking of which: anyone know how to get a free, legal copy of any revision of ISO/IEC 14496-15? I've had luck with some of its close friends, but not that one.)

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It’s been my informal experience that if a spec is available for cheap from https://www.evs.ee/en/ then it’s often somewhat hard to find, but in this case 14496-15 is only listed in it’s more expensive variant and there’s no cheap one available.

When that happens, I can often find a copy of the spec by hunting down zip files of drafts attached to meeting records online or I can find a draft copy of the spec after a simple registration form. I can’t speak to this one for the 2019 latest version or newer, but I did find out what might be some earlier versions at the bottom of https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-4/carriage-nal-... for example. Or for newer work-in-progress: https://www.mpegstandards.org/standards/MPEG-4/15/ No promises that anything found this way will be used/useful yet.

I've looked at that mpeg.chariaglione.org URL you linked (many times) but it doesn't seem to have the full standard (even a draft), just amendments and very target corrections.

Thanks for the other two links; I don't see anything useful for this one, but maybe they'll help next time...

How about this? https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-4/carriage-nal-... Seemed relatively complete to me though I don’t have access to source docs to confirm.

That's an amendment. I guess it's better than nothing, though: it has the definition of AVCDecoderConfigurationRecord (because it extends it).

The one that I find especially ridiculous is IEEE 754. How do they expect languages to have correct math libraries if they don't publish what "correct" means?

IEEE 754 is published and publicly available for anyone to purchase. It's not freely distributed, but that's far cry from unpublished work or something available only for members of the cabal.

http://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzacebqg3j6dzlg4srgyrfdksroopamjruu...

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