SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

282 points96 commentsa day ago
lambdaone

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.

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geerlingguy

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

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guerby

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 ...

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andersthuesen

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!

ksec

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...

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fitsumbelay

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

fithisux

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

And this should be mandatory.

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cloud8421

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

cyberax

What the heck is SMPTE?

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RossBencina

Great, now do AES and IEEE.

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