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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

I like them too but my gripe is they claim BRAW is an "open and license-free standard" when (as far as I can tell) it's undocumented, supported only via closed binary blobs and distributed under a very non-free license.

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I actually worked on some of the obfuscation for the SDK back when I worked there. :)

The goal wasn't to promote software freedom but to ensure that anyone could simply download the DLLs and use it in their software without needing to sign an NDA, beg for permission or deal with patent bullshit.

The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this (primarily through stuff like camera calibration data, but also the maths in n the background) that they don't want ripped off by competitors.

As I understand it BRAW was developed to avoid RED's patents, which I heartily approve of but I don't think they should advertise it as "open and license free" when it isn't.

Like I said, I do like BM's stuff. I was a Free Software puritan for a long time but when I started doing video stuff Resolve was just too tempting.

Some technical decisions were made to avoid RED's patents, but I don't think that's the main reason BMD wanted to make their own codec.

From the outside it seemed like they removed CinemaDNG due to patent threats from RED, and added BRAW to replace it. But that might be joining the dots and making five.

I suspect it was more of a case that CinemaDNG is just a pain to copy/move from one storage media to another; thousands of small-ish files are much slower and more cumbersome than a single large file.

I don't believe CinemaDNG is affected by Red patents because it's basically just a folder of numerically sequenced '.dng' still images and DNG is an Adobe standard. You see other companies using it.

Note: I am not a lawyer and Red may well have tried to sue somehow, but the basics of CinemaDNG compression go back to JPEG T-81 from the 1990's.

Wikipedia says "The adoption of CinemaDNG among camera manufacturers appears to be hindered by Red Digital Camera’s patent US9245314"[0]. Also there'd be no reason to remove CinemaDNG from their cameras otherwise? Plus I'm fairly sure Grant Petty alluded to patent issues when he announced they were removing CinemaDNG and adding BRAW.

I'm not intimate with the patent but from what I understand you're right, CinemaDNG is just a sequence of stills in a tarball. In which case it seems nuts that the patent office granted and upheld a patent covering that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaDNG

On the topic of obfuscation, would you recommend a specific product or solution?

> The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this

This doesn't check out. The Linux kernel has billions of dollars in R&D, and where is the obfuscation?

I am responding to Joeboy.

The state of FOSS NLE's is laughable. OpenShot is a mess.

Does it need to be FOSS if it is just free? Resolve has filled that niche for many many people. Very few of them care that they can’t modify the code.

What contributions to FOSS NLEs are you working on?

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