> After this article a Raystream press release
> stated,"Raystream announced an independent international property rights
> management law firm conducted a thorough investigation of Raystream’s
> algorithm and has issued an opinion letter verifying that all aspects of
> Raystream’s software and technology are in compliance with the GNU Lesser
> General Public License (LGPL) held by the Free Software Foundation.
This is a lie: x264 is not licensed under the LGPL, it is licensed
under the GPL. They are two very different licenses.
> Raystream’s compression algorithm is built on the x264 encoder
> licensed by CoreCodec, making it compliant with the worldwide standard
> format for video output."
This is a lie: CoreCodec has not licensed to Raystream, and will never
license to Raystream.
> I know I have been longwinded here so here are my main questions for you.
>
> Does this change anything?
Does what change anything? The company still looks like a bunch of
lying scammers to me.
> Does X264 compress live HD/3D video as it is being created?
Of course it does, what else would it do?
> Would a compression algorithm built on X264 still be called X264? Or even
> possible?
x264 is GPL. If they modified x264 to improve it, and integrated it
into their software, they would have to distribute their improvements.
This could be avoided if they just kept the software server-side, but
I recall that they intended to distribute their encoding software.
> Have you kept up with Raystream or are even more than passingly interested
> in what they claim?
Of course not. Raystream is just another scam company (there's lots
of these). They may backpedal on everything they say to try to sound
more legitimate, but that doesn't change the fact that they lied
through their teeth repeatedly -- something that legitimate companies
generally don't do, especially about things with direct legal
consequences.
> What would be the benefits of hiring a company like Raystream to compress
> and stream your video as opposed to doing it yourself? Is this practice
> commonplace?
There are many companies that provide *legitimate* encoding services.
Zencoder and encoding.com are two of these, but there's lots of others
too. These can be useful because they provide legitimate value-adds
which they are very clear about:
1. They handle outputs to many different devices with different
requirements, so you don't have to worry about it.
2. Some of them have a lot of code to deal with weird inputs --
ranging from simple stuff like automatic deinterlacing to more
complicated things. This is especially useful if your input is very
heterogenous. Having worked at Facebook, the scripting required to
deal with all the junk people upload can get rather painful.
3. They often provide CDN services or direct hookups with existing
CDN services, so you don't have to worry about that part yourself.
4. They often provide things like on the fly bitrate switching,
"smooth streaming", etc, and more complicated features that -- while
not terribly hard to implement -- are a nice convenience if it's not
worth doing it yourself.
5. They provide CPU power; you don't have to worry about dispatching
your own EC2 instances or the like.
(and lots more, just see their sites!)
These companies happily admit the encoders they use, and do not claim
impossible improvements in compression. This is because they are
confident that these sorts of value-adds make them useful to some
customers.
Raystream is a scam, so I doubt they would provide any benefits over
someone legitimate.
> Are there any companies that currently use x264 and profit from it in the
> way Raystream is trying to?
Most "encoding companies" that use x264 are open about the fact that
they do, and as per the above, they don't attempt to claim credit for
it. At this point, anyone who *doesn't* use x264 is doing it wrong --
"we use x264" is much akin to "we have a clue what we're doing".
There have been a few companies that tried what Raystream was trying
to. At one point I saw a website for a (terribly named) company
called "Digital Blonde" that claimed "revolutionary compression
improvements" with their encoding service, using their "proprietary
compression algorithm". Of course they were just ripping off x264 and
claiming it was their own work.
Legitimate companies don't plagiarize.
> Would you allow me to post this email and/or your reply to the
> message board community?
Sure.
> If not then I will myself rest assured with your
> opinion on this matter for myself. Please know that I am trying to get my
> own answers about this company which I am currently invested in. I will be
> making phone calls, emails and literally beating the door down to find out
> for myself if my investment is folly. I am not a wealthy man but I have
> saved enough to try and get in with a startup company like Raystream.
Sorry, but you got scammed hard. Next time, try not buying penny
stocks; you'd probably have more fun putting your money into a pyre
and burning it.
Jason
AI
