In fact, the problem is that you have to buy a subscription, with all the implications in terms of loss of control, privacy, security, etc...
$5 on a $6299 camera is nothing, just pay for it, petty but not really infuriating. Even at $500 I would simply pay should I need it. If I had reasons to buy a $6299 camera, it probably means a budget in the tens of thousands, for lenses, lighting, accessories, etc... $500 is peanuts by comparison.
But I certainly wouldn't want my very expensive setup to fail just because some server is down.
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
Canon is a company that is in the business of making profit (not just software or just hardware).
If they realize that they can charge you $1 for every time you chew gum while taking photos, and people will actually pay for that privilege $1-per-chewing-gum-session (disclaimer: chewing gum not provided) they would charge you!
Getting paid $6k for a camera once is good. Getting paid another $50 a year for doing nothing is even better.
I assume the great brain who came with the idea is: "we got 10 million cameras out there, if 0.5% of those camera owners pay $50 pa, then that's 10m x 0.5% x $50 = $2.5m pa. If I could get a 100k bonus for bringing $2.5m gross to my company I would also suggest this idea.
Yunno, I wouldn't. Even for 100k on the table. I wouldn't suggest it. I have bills to pay, student loan debt, etc. but for one, I wouldn't want to suggest something that would have long term negative brand impact, and two, but more importantly, I wouldn't want to suggest developing something that if I were to use would piss me off. Make the world you want to see. Engineers share in the responsibility for things like this existing.
Sure, and that's why I don't think they'd invest heavily in anti-piracy measures. It requires a special skillset, your average developer isn't going to really know much about it. If I had to guess, there's a single "isProTier" function call that you just patch to return true. Maybe it's inlined and it's slightly more annoying. I doubt they did much more than that, but maybe I'm completely wrong.
The latest firmware update for the Sony A7S III has introduced unlockable licenses and a website where you can buy them. The first one (for DCI 4K) is free, but it looks like they'll be chraging for unlocking more "professional" firmware features in the future.
It's just experience from a video monitoring project we made for a Telco operator - we had to pay up quite a few JPEG related tech, just to get a certification. Even despite that tech being free.
Historically video related field was one of the most patent and license encumbered. That's why AV1 exists.
Yep. This is a sign that the meetings have already happened, and that the course has already been set. The idea was already sold, has picked some momentum, and possibly defines a few people's bonuses.
I wonder when we'll reach a tipping point for the subscription hell that the world is moving towards. On the other hand, with the amount of consolidation and difficulty competing (especially with Lina Khan out) I'm not sure if that will ever happen.
At some point I feel like it just has to collapse. The thing I don't really understand is subscriptions like the one in the article, how many of those types of subscriptions are effectively dead, in the sense that yes the customer keeps paying, but aren't actually using the "service" anymore.
The indie / startup space has been so all in on subscription revenue that I guess it's not a huge surprise that the big companies eventually tried to get in on the act.
And this is probably because Canon corporate won't justify a budget for developing this software unless they expect separate revenue for it, even though it's clearly just value-add to the (already very expensive) hardware.
Bit of a weird argument considering you can use other brand cameras as webcams without any third party software. At least, all my Sony cameras can just be plugged in using USB and it works immediately. No drivers required.
Are you sure? The article talks about using it as a webcam and none of the Sony gear I've used supports that (A6500, A7 I/RI/II/SII/III/RIII/SIII).
They did make the "Imaging Edge Webcam" program, I think some time during the pandemic, but AFAIK it's just a PTP preview to webcam driver, so the quality is pretty terrible and you can do that with OBS+gphoto2.
A7RV + A6700 here. If you plug in a USB cable, it shows the usual "usb selection screen", but it includes a "USB streaming" option. It works immediately, flawlessly, on windows and macOS. For remote shooting, there's still the "PC remote" option.
My older Sony cameras (A6300 is my newest "old" Sony camera) don't have the feature (unless you use that terrible software you mentioned) Im surprised to read that even the reasonably modern A7SIII doesn't support it. It must be one of the last models without USB streaming support.
Fellow Sony a7iv owner here. I can confirm this works on my camera too.
For older cameras, probably the easiest way to do it (if you don't want to install anything) is to pick up a ~$20 usb HDMI capture card from amazon. Connect the HDMI output on the camera to the capture card. And then set your camera up to output a "clean" video source via the HDMI port.
As I understand it, modern capture cards work without drivers on every OS, just like the modern sony cameras do.
but the software has already been built so the budget was still found somehow.
My gut feeling is that it's mostly useful for streamers, and some of them have big budgets so they went for a high price
The development was presumably funded off the back of expected revenue.
For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job - something connecting direct to a network outputting NDI, or something with SDI output.
> For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job
They mostly don't, though. The standard "high-end" streaming setup is whatever second-hand mirrorless camera has a clear HDMI output, and an HDMI capture card.
I'm not sure since I don't have any Canon gear, but it's very likely that the app just uses the PTP protocol, which is an old but stil common standard. The main ioen source implementation is libgphoto2 and there's an OBS Studio plugin to use it as a camera source, after which you can use its built-in virtual webcam mode to use it as a webcam.
Newer Nikon and apparently also some Sony cameras simply support USB UVC ("the webcam protocol"), which makes this pure plug and play, but apparently Canon doesn't. For older cameras there's a Nikon webcam utility or something like that, which does exactly what you suggest: grab preview frames via PTP and stuff them into a video source. Or you get an HDMI/USB dongle for 10$.
> Why $6,2999 when the article says he payed around $900?
In the fifth paragraph:
“Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6300 from the article's title, much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I'm describing translates to every other Canon camera model!”
Reasons like this is why the Japanese companies are eating sh*t and are VERY interested in pushing for a US-China war just like the western companies.
Everything coming out of China is way more customer friendly, usually way cheaper and getting better and better to a point that they are surpassing everything else that exists. If DJI releases a full-frame mirrorless camera with L-mount (which they are going to), Canon, Nikon, Fuji and all these companies with firmware from the 90s will die and I am not going to miss them.
They have made absolutely no effort to provide any value and a whole lot of tacit collusion is going on. They still sell you SD cards instead of including an SSD which would be MUCH cheaper and faster. Same with battery technology. Compatibility, apps, software... everything.
Regarding products from China being cheaper: remember that Japanese, Korean, and Western companies are the ones mostly innovating and absorbing the R&D costs. Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung? Having stolen that IP[0][1][2], without any R&D costs but with dirt cheap manufacturing due to direct and indirect subsidies like relatively almost nonexistent labour protection laws, PRC companies could of course immediately flood the market with cheaper alternatives.
You can choose your suppliers by other measures than merely price. Arguably, you should if the market you are particupating in is not free and fair in this way.
Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts, I see no reason to switch to a Chinese brand (well, also there is no product that beats it on both specs and price, but even if there was I would think twice). People tend to over-generalize, but reality is not as simple as “all manufacturers from %country1% are better because X and all manufacturers from %country2% suffer from issue Y”.
What you say about innovation has been true mostly in the distant past and mostly for technologies that are used in business-to-business products.
For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar.
Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better start to copy the Chinese if they want to stay competitive, but instead of doing that, they push for the same kind of tariff protections for which the US heavily criticized any other country in the past and blackmailed them in various ways to force them to remove the tariff protections against US companies.
In the OLED example people were indicted in 2018 and went to prison in 2023 or 2024. You are making it seem like it’s an old story, but it’s not really true.
I think it goes both ways for sure. My Sony mirrorless camera is incredible - and there's been lots of R&D work over decades that have made my camera possible.
But I got a DJI Ronin (handheld gimbal) the other day. Its a gamechanger. With the camera mounted on the gimbal, I can do handheld shots that you could easily use in a blockbuster movie.
The only downside is that the whole thing (camera + gimbal) is a very awkward package. The weight is in the wrong place. And that means the gimbal needs to be bigger and bulkier to compensate - which in turn makes it even more awkward to use. You could make a much better product by integrating the gimbal and camera. Put just the lens and sensor on the gimbal, but move the screen, battery and CPU to the "outside" package. Then you could shrink the gimbal itself and remove all the mounting hardware and manual weight adjustment sliders.
Apparently DJI has started making $10k cinema cameras along exactly these lines. I really hope the Japanese camera brands take notice. From a product standpoint, its a big deal - and I'm sure it won't be long before DJI makes much cheaper video cameras that start seriously eating Sony & Canon's market share.
"Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book, Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as the world's industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.”
Weren’t people in the US doing so at that point actually fresh English/Irish themselves who just moved or were moving to the new world? Can you elaborate how it is similar to the situation with PRC now, unless you suggest it’s freshly founded by Americans?
>Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung?
That was Japan's game to lose and their loss was absolutely deserved. Japanese companies are more interested in bickering with each other, while Korean and Chinese companies have bigger worldly goals.
Japan Display[1] and Renesas[2] could have been the LG/Samsung had Japan realized much sooner that there are better things to be doing than dragging each other down.
I am not sure what you are saying. LG and Samsung are both Korean… They had the original OLED tech that was leaked to China. LG recently had to shut down a factory due to reduced demand IIRC. Hard to compete with fully state-controlled command economy.
Japanese companies spent time and money investing in new technologies and then proceeded to waste them because they were far more interested in keeping trade secrets to themselves and dragging each other down, rather than coming together and acting as one national industry like Korean and Chinese companies. The Japanese companies did come together eventually (Japan Display, et al.), but way too late.
Okay. Just confusing because my example was about Korean companies. They were very much open to trade and less focused on secrets, which I suppose led to exactly the situation described. Once Apple switched to BOE for cheaper OLED panels (allegedly resulting in a higher rate of defects in iPad screens), LG was forced to shut down an entire plant IIRC.
Samsung is not exactly averse to IP theft eg [1, 2] ... If you
are responsible for 22.4% of South Korea's GDP [3], one may
wonder if we even hear about all other cases ...
> Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts,
> They still sell you SD cards instead of including an SSD which would be MUCH cheaper and faster.
I don't think the power draw of an SSD plays well with the current battery tech.
Plus most user value the fact that you can rapidly swap those thing. The last thing you want to do during a wedding is having to wait for the data to transfer and/or the battery to recharge.
I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously.
The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt.
Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it would appear that owning something that could physically do what you want it to is only half the battle for numerous reasons, and in this case it would have been my government demanding extra money to 'unlock' this functionality.
No, this is not the reason. If the camera records video for more than 30min, then it is a video camera, see the question answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640107
In short, there is no good reason anymore, but originally this was because of EU import tarifs.
It's not a joke, older DSLR cameras would often overheat when recording continuously. My good old Canon 6D would overheat once in a while when used as a webcam with v4l2loopback.
Even as recently as the Canon R5 Mark I mirrorless camera (which you can still buy new), overheats within 15 minutes if you're recording 8K30 or 4K120.
IT's not a joke. When filming for more than 30 minutes the cameras at the time (10-15 years ago) would warm up and eventually shut off automatically to cool off.
Sometimes there are hidden menus or settings that might allow you to toggle those features. I used to work on TVs and we had a secret menu that toggles various features. Some of those features would be disabled for specific countries (mainly for patents)
This vaguely reminds me of the fact that in many countries, pure ethanol sold for industrial purposes is intentionally made poisonous, so you can’t drink it and thus merchants don’t have to charge the taxes on it that they would for spirits.
It's more like "so you can't drink it" without the taxes part. Those taxes play important role in reducing alcohol consumption (though they are of course not the only tool), so making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy rather than opens a loophole in taxation.
And in some, it's a tourist attraction. Don't drink "White Elephant" in Vietnam unless you want to wake up blind and pissing blood, at least according to a friend!
In some countries it's done so and poisoning is banned. E.g. Finland and Poland got an exemption from the EU to do this because so many people died from the poisonings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium is used to make it unpalatable. Fun fact: the same chemical is also coated onto Nintendo Switch cartridges to discourage children from putting them in their mouths.
We used to use denatonium (Bitrex) in firefighting to test the efficacy of your face mask seal - you'd put on your mask, a filter, and a hood - Bitrex would be aerosolized into the hood and if you could taste it, there was not a good seal.
It was specifically about methanol. Methanol wasn't explicitly used as a denaturation agent but ethanol methanol mixture sales were (forced to be) allowed. Can't find much in English but here's a brief story.
Methanol sales were banned in Finland prior to EU and Finland applied for the exemption already in the EU application in the early 1990s. It was finally granted in 2019. Probably around 500 people died and many got blinded meanwhile.
I live in one of the countries that just made it taste bad (because enough people died of poisoning it was allowed as an exception by the EU). I've drank a shot of denaturated alcohol once - half out of curiosity, half because I was already out of liquor at home for that evening.
If you close your nose the taste is just bitter, but bearable. The additives are supposed to make you vomit, but for me I only had vomit reflex for ~5 seconds after swallowing. I could live with that if I was addicted and couldn't afford a regular alcohol. I'm sure many people do.
Not sure what the moral is. I guess that addiction is a really strong motivator, and tax evasion is not a good enough reason to justify killing people with poison.
Including not checking as one person I know found out after drinking hand sanitizer. (some hand sanitizer is just alcohol that is made to taste bad, some of it isn't even alcohol, she got the later)
Does remind me when I talked to a chef from a big restaurant about wine and cooking. He said, a lot of people who work in a kitchen have often an smaller or bigger alcohol problem. He said, as soon as wine is opened in the kitchen for cooking, he does add just a bit salt, so people in the team don't even try to drink some cooking wine.
That doesn't seem like a good idea as a lot of people would try to reduce salt intake due to blood pressure concerns, where the alcohol in this wouldn't be a concern for that as it would likely be cooked off
That’s going to be tough. Shaoxing wine and soy sauce both have lots of sodium in them because they’re intended for seasoning dishes without the need to add salt separately. Even dòuchǐ (fermented black soybeans), which offer a similar flavour profile to soy sauce in solid form, have a lot of salt.
The thread is about bad things because of tax policy, your post is about a good thing because of health policy - but you don’t say it’s a good thing, or that it’s about heath not taxes.
The post pointing this out has different content to yours, which reads as if your meaning is “this reminds me of another bad thing caused by tax policies” - even if that’s not what you meant.
I think if it's working as intended and as designed then it's hard to call it a loophole. Loophole would be when dying your spirit purple would change the taxation, because someone codified the color of alcohol instead of it's content.
You're assigning a single mind to a group of uncoordinated actors to create a hypocrisy that probably doesn't exist in any specific individual.
It looks like a loophole, it
could be in the textbook describing them. You have a law that establishes a rule, then creates a small exception that in effect opts out of the rule entirely. The people who want this provision eliminated don't know it was intended. That's pretty in the weeds of congress' internal negotiations
The "gunshow" loophole is really a "private sellers" exemption. If you don't regularly sell guns, then you don't need an FFL to merely sell a small number, and don't have to do background checks (indeed there's no process such that you _can_ do firearms checks).
Now, it might be reasonable to remove this exemption, but the only way it's a "gunshow" loophole is that gun shows are a place where gun fans wanting to buy are going to meet gun fans wanting to sell.
Making it trivial for someone to do firearms checks seems like an easy thing that everyone should support, but alas no one in power seems to actually want such a thing.
> making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy
I have never seen this as anything other than the death penalty for evading taxes. If the tax were designed to reduce consumption across the population, it needs to scale with income or net worth. Otherwise, it's just a tax on the poor.
I heat my house with oil, a truck comes every couple of months and fills a massive tank in my back yard.
This "oil" is basically diesel. It smells and feels identical to diesel. But it's about 70 cents cheaper per litre compared to road diesel. It's dyed red, and you are not supposed to put it in your car, but I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines.
The red diesel is not taxed like road diesel, and is much cheaper.
> I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines
There's always the risk of getting your fuel tank dipped if you're on road. Moreso for trucks, but some jurisdictions will set up inspections and check for dyed fuel and tear you an absolute new one when they catch it.
The exit of off road events is a common place to check this. So much so that there is a reputation in the off road community and now they don't even need to check often anymore since nobody is stupid enough to risk driving a truck that has ever had off road fuel in it there.
Here, that's commonly called red diesel (despite them changing to green decades ago) and it's sold for agricultural use. There are a number of cross border smuggling operations where criminals remove the dye and resell it for somewhere between the two prices.
Though primarily done to trucks, there are occasional fuel tests done by police. Even if your tank is currently clean, they'll occasionally pull out the fuel filters and check those for dye.
That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :)
I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access - like copying the CDs you already bought to your phone. Compared to what we used to pay on blank media it's not so bad. If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything
The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.
Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.
Oddities in German copyright or related law don't just have that effect on piracy, they make certain forms of “copyleft trolling” by third parties (who may be in no way linked to the content creator) possible, or at least far easier. This isn't the only route to copyleft trolling, of course.
Fun fact: Stack Overflow possibly violated Creative Commons licensing by putting a Mullenweg-style checkbox in front of downloading the quarterly data dumps. They were notified more than 30 days ago. Therefore, almost all content older than 30 days on Stack Overflow is there illegally. Any lawyers reading? Go nuts.
I reject this view of the law completely at least in Portugal. The law was introduced to add a tax to every storage media one can purchase with the premise that a percentage of that storage media will be used for what they call piracy. This in effect means everyone is assumed to be breaking the law in advance and paying for it in advance.
As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?
In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.
Same in France where the money goes to the local RIAA. Even if it’s a hard drive meant for Linux, or to store public domain stuff. It’s basically a mafia that gets our money despite copying for backup purposes being completely legal.
In France it’s called the SACEM and I know a few bands that are affiliated to this association because it’s pretty much mandatory if you want to sell anything.
Those bands are not famous but despite making sales, they only get a few bucks every year, or it’s the SACEM saying "we forgot to send you the check lol, no biggies." It’s the biggest legal mafia I can think of right now.
Most of the money collected is sent to huge artists (like what Spotify is doing), there is nothing indie about it even if they pretend it’s for the glory of French music.
Taxation has overhead. If they were to actually track everyone's use and intention on a case-by-case basis, everything would get massively more expensive, just to offset the amount of extra bureaucracy needed to handle this.
It's the same idea as to why reducing the amount of means-testing and other hoops to jump to get social benefits would save taxpayers money - sure, more people who don't need benefits would get them, but that's more than offset by what would be saved by eliminating the workload of (and government jobs dedicated to) gate-keeping those benefits.
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.
> This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access
Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?
> blank media
But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.
> the alternative is that you are not allowed
But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
This issue does not appear weird.
There is some legally technical difference between a video camera and a still photo camera. Probably different tariffs or something. Not weird at all and it is not uncommon anywhere in the world for different classes och products to be classified differently, infallibly because of industry lobbyism to reduce their costs or to reduce their prices for their specific product.
The manufacturer chose to limit the product for the consumer for their own economic benefit. Nothing is stopping them from playing ball except their own profit motive.
Don't be too jealous. Your industry won't win with German anyway, but at least German industry won't lose to China like the rest of the world, so as long as you're in the EU, you're still ahead :).
All countries have tariffs. All tariff systems classify goods in some way. On top of the fact that this is by necessity not ever absolutely accurate even initially, these classifications also lag technological development and consumer behaviour.
If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.
Yeah, once upon a time I lived in the mountains in Canada and bought a lot of stuff from the US because at the time the Canadian dollar was more or less at par and far cheaper down in the US. I randomly came across the fact that mountaineering equipment was tariffed at 0% because back in like 1920 Canada, like many countries, thought being the first to climb whatever mountain would bring us national glory. Anyways, I would drive down Blain, WA to a parcel shop and collect the stuff I bought online and had shipped there, drive back up and claim it was all "mountaineering" equipment. Nope, those ain't ski boots, they're mountaineering boots, and etc.
I'd still have to pay tax on it, though. IIRC there wasn't any personal exemption amount if you'd left Canada for under 24 hours, unlike they have now. Sometimes they'd just wave you through even when trying to declare something, which was always a nice little bonus savings.
>> If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.
To a (considerable) extent yes. But it appears to be going backwards - from 2021 online shops have had to know and apply VAT for a product to the buyers country, not the country in which they are based, and thresholds for charging and submitting this VAT were eliminated. Basically handing over more online retail to the likes of Amazon.
Different products have different VAT rates in each country, the only thing that can't be discriminated on is the (EU) country of origin. This is still absolutely susceptible to the whims of political favour and local industry lobbying. A recent example from Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087643
[Admittedly I'm unlikely to be buying chocolate and crisps online from Germany, but if I were a German seller needs to charge the correct rate of VAT for each, which will likely be different from Germany and every other EU country]
It was just a outdated import fee from a time when it made sense to protect the domestic industry - due to technological developments the import duty was removed. In fact it was removed almost 10 years ago.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
That is an acceptable position and you will likely nor require further investigation as long as the criticism remains vague and is offset by positive sentiment. I too love the EU.
I have a family member of retirement age who got into the habit of anonymously expressing their love of the EU in the comments section of a local newspaper.
After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.
I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.
Not 100% sure as they didn't introduce themselves but whoever called was able to get the phone number that the IP address was linked to and I assume both would have to have been involved in order to do that.
Not sure if we’re talking about the same situation, but the last time I was in Bulgaria, there was massive brain drain and a lot of, eh, ‘false nostalgia’ for a very different past.
But tons of money coming in from the EU. I can imagine a lot of public quiet, private ‘angst’ about the kind of situation you’re describing.
If this story is true then I'm suddenly in favor of brexit while before I thought it was worse for everyone. Of course I live in the US and so my opinion should be of zero interest on anyway. Still if you live in the EU I would hope you are concerned.
I never said someone from the EU called, we think it was someone from the national government. Or it could just be someone from the newspaper who knows someone at the telecom company and they decided to have a laugh.
More or less all tariffs and sales tax systems are like this; the rules are _always_ kind of all over the place.
My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.)
There's also the famous Jaffa Cake case, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status , but I think the Subway one has an extra element of absurdity because it went all the way to the _Supreme Court_.
Patchworks of rules and exceptions can be beneficial. It allows for experimentation and/or competition as well as the fact that regulations can often enough not keep up with change and they can be more entrenched if done at a higher level. Where, when, and what is better harmonized across a whole market VS allowing variation is a matter of debate.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
Tariffs around the world have weird stuff like that. Very little to do with the EU itself. Expect a lot more weird things like that to happen in the US now with the new US government implementing new tariffs.
Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff.
Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.
Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.
In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.
The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."
What I think is happening is that the place is specifically charging different tax rates for each part of the pizza. That does seem odd but the alternative would be to tax the whole of the pizza at a higher tax rate than the one presented. Example, most countries might put a whole pizza at, say, 10% VAT, while here part of it is at, say, 4% and the rest at 10%. Ideally that's cheaper.
The pizza thing seemed incredibly silly to me. Surely the restaurant has already paid the tax when they bought the raw ingredients? Must any product served in a restaurant be taxed according to the rate of the most highly taxed ingredient in it, regardless of proportion?
So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.
Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.
This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.
The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.
This reminds me of maybe the worst tax in human history which is also unconstitutional. The Pauschalabgabe[0] in Germany, which also got adopted in other countries, implements a freely decidable flatrate tax on all mediums which can be used to create a pirated copy.
How much tax for a laser printer? Well it depends how fast it prints:
Up to 14 pages/Minute: 25,00 €
Up to 39 pages/Minute: 50,00 €
From 40 pages/Minute: 87,50 €
For every storage medium this tax has been paid, because of the possibility of making a pirated copy. Technically we all paid already to make pirates copies.
Isn't this also what allows people to create copies for personal use, and what makes downloading pirated media legally clear, and only producing/distributing illegal? Sounds like a fine tradeoff, as fixing IP laws (and international treaties) is way too hard of a problem.
It’s the other way around the law got created because of the possibility of private copies and their fear of profit loss. A private copy is only legal if the source is legal. Circumventing copy protection makes it illegal.
Pirated copies and temporary copies like streaming are afaik grey areas because the difficulty to prove and not a trade off.
It’s a silly world where people who never worked send people who only worked as mobsters to take money from people who work for a living. Then the first two groups share that money in 999999:1 proportion. They call it “taxation”.
It has upsides like having an army for defense, roads and other common things. But don’t forget the primary nature and motivation behind it. They just want your money, and your offspring to please them in various ways.
I believe it was sold into the US market originally. I bought it second hand in a secondary market that sources its used articles primarily from the USA and Canada.
It would actually be way to miss. If it hadn’t been marked with a sunglasses emblem, I would have easily thought it was just a gusset. It’s just one of the bottom front corners of the left side of the shirt, with a triangular gusset that is big enough to just hold 2/3 of a pair of glasses, mesh, in this particular case.
This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2
I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.
Maybe it was just a passion project for the engineers or even Ken Kutaragi ? See also Net Yarose, Linux For Playstation 2, Other OS & Yellow Dog Linux for Playstation 3.
Well, in the end it didn't save them anything, because the EC didn't accept that having a toy basic interpreter made what was obviously a games console a PC. I can't imagine it was terribly expensive in the scheme of things, though.
If it can run a desktop linux environment it's a PC. That said it probably should only count if the preinstalled software is Linux and not some games OS.
When you ship millions of units of the kit, you only need a small savings per unit for the sum total to become a big enough saving to be noticeable to the financial dept. bean counters.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! I can't have POLITICS in my comics, my comics are apolitical, there's good guys and bad guys, and it's always clear who the bad guys are - those that are not [like] me! /s
Sounds like Ford putting seats in the back of their vans so they could pay less tax when importing them from Mexico, then removing them before they're sold. Looks like they've now been fined, but they got away with it for a while.
Or when the makers of Jaffa Cakes baked a giant 12 inch version[1] and brought it to the court to argue they were cakes and not biscuits to get lower VAT.
Most UK bikkies are meh, though. I have to import ones from NZ here to survive.
Mallowpuffs are so much better than tea cakes. Squiggles, Tim tams, chit chats, sultana pasties, griffins macaroons, toffee pops, hundreds and thousands, mint slice.
Whereas here it's mostly shortbread or bourbons/custard creams.
When Trump set a tariff on German optics because he was mad at Germany, Leica had a workaround as well.
Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.
So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".
I wonder if there is any place where one can look up all these sort of creative legal-tax shenanigan stories. They are so fun and such an interesting lens to see what _is_ via this interlinked, case-specific web of events.
Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.
My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.
If there were any tax implications, they were incidental. The show was parody, so the opinions he espoused in character were necessarily ones he didn't actually hold.
And then when he tried using the "Steven Colbert" character on a different show,
Comedy Central threatened him because Steven Colbert does not have rights to the "Steven Colbert" character.
Yep- if Pee-wee Herman’s character were instead named after the actor, Paul Reubens, that character could still be licensed/sold. Paul Ruebens could still do interviews, and take jobs under that name, without permission, but he’d better not show up in the Pee-wee outfit.
Al Shugart started Shugart Associates and pretty much created the 5 1/4" floppy market. He sold to Xerox. He later started Shugart Technology and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit because he literally had sold his rights to his own name (in the particular context). He changed the name to Seagate Technology and the rest is history.
Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.
> Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.
This is not that case.
In popular media when "The Colbert Report" was broadcast, Steven Colbert was very open about the fact that he was playing a character on TV who happened to have the same name as him.
In the case of "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert," he is not playing the character from the Colbert Report.
The very specific bit was from after the 2017 election when Trump was elected. Steven Colbert did a bit, in character as "Steven Colbert", with props from "The Colbert Report", and a guest appearance from Jon Stewart. (Because the main focus of "The Colbert Report" was to mock conservatives.) Otherwise, everything Steven Colbert (the person) does on "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert" does not involve the "Steven Colbert" character from "The Colbert Report."
To be fair, in Steven Colbert's case, he definitely was playing a character on The Colbert Report. A ridiculously conservative one that asked guests repeatedly if George W. Bush was a great president, or the greatest president. It was very over the top.
And that's when he stopped being funny. As a big fan I was confused by how unfunny his tonight show content was from day one compared to everything we saw upto that point. I can see why legal action when nowhere it's not the same product. Using the same name does cause confusion in the marketplace.
Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)
Thank you for pointing this out. Carlson and Maddow made nearly identical arguments in court and if both are not mentioned in the same breath, the speakers bias is instantly displayed to anyone who is educated on this topic.
> IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.
Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.
Carlson's texts were wild, they proved that he knew he was spreading lies and did it anyway for views. That's why Fox settled with Dominion for $787 million dollars.
Meanwhile, OAN sued Maddow for calling them Russian propaganda and her lawyers responded by flexing, doubling down with receipts under oath. Signing up for consequences if they were wrong, and receiving none because they were correct.
So no, these are not the same, and anyone who argues that they are immediately reveals themselves to be partisan hacks.
[Judge Smith] found OAN and its parent company were unlikely to prevail on the defamation claim because the challenged speech was not a statement of fact and the context of Maddow’s show made it likely her audience would expect her to make political opinions.
Putting the details of the court case aside, the judge is clearly saying that he does not believe that Maddow's show was "news" and it shouldn't be treated as such. That's what GP was pointing out: the defense of being "not news", which both shows have in common.
Nope. You paid very selective attention to that article:
> the context provided by Maddow’s commentary before and after she made the statement disclosed all relevant facts and contained colorful language.
If you listen to the clip in question, you'll observe that Maddow explains the facts, makes an exclamation, and then explains the facts. The complaint here only works if you clip chimp the exclamation. Contrast this with the complaint against Carlson, where he engages in what was by his own admission sustained deception.
> the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News
I think the 'average' person thinks of 'Entertainment News' as celebrity gossip, e.g., E! News[0] etc. Telling them the entertainment news/opinion/commentary they watch is not actually 'News' but is entertainment "news" doesn't compute
Absolutely- even as a lifelong leftie, I find the rhetoric on CNBC just as sickening as that on Fox.
I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.
What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]
That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.
Well, context matters in looking at defamation claims.
Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.
If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]
If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.
Isn't it also how, many years ago, Top Gear got away with a hit job on Tesla by claiming they're just an entertainment show, so they're not obligated to do honest or truthful reviews?
Yes, Jaffa Cakes - minature sponge cakes flavoured with Jaffa oranges. Cakes aren't subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, which allows them to be sold more cheaply to the consumer or have a greater profit margin. A tribunal confirmed that they are true, real and genuine cakes, so you may feel entitled to enjoy your tax-free treat!
In a way it's not completely tax-free; the embodied costs of producing and selling the cake are still taxed with employee income tax, National Insurance, import duties and so on.
The UK's exemption from VAT covers lots of things, but not an entirely logical selection: cakes are considered staples and are exempt, but drinks (including soft drinks, beer and mineral water) are taxed at the full 20% rate.
In general, I would personally prefer that the UK not have VAT, as it's a regressive tax (people with lower incomes pay a greater percentage of their income on it than high earners do).
I think basic and healthy foods should be VAT exempt. Bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, fruit (maybe not fruit that needs to be shipped from South America or Africa), water etc. Also maybe school books and newspapers and of course medicine. Sugary drinks _should_ be taxed.
Sales tax is horrendously regressive and during a war you will find that things like cakes and biscuits are not actually frivolous at all. We drink a lot of tea.
The window tax features prominently in a visual novel video game (The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles), which also contains a bunch of wildly outlandish historical nonsense and characters like mad-scientist inventors, teleportation devices, and Sherlock Holmes types. I was blown away to learn the window tax was actually a real thing, not something silly just made up for the game.
The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.
I remember hearing about this because the one who wanted it classified as a biscuit proposed the test that determined it was a cake. That is the sole reason I remember this story.
I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.
I’ve come across this before and think it’s brilliant. Are you aware of any comparable firmware for Nikon users (not that I really have any complaints about what Nikon has provided, but this is likely a case of not knowing what I’m missing out on)?
I'm not, and that's the reason why I went Canon. There is also CHDK for cheaper Canon cameras. Canon seems to be less litigous when it comes to hacking their firmware.
That requirement is reversed in the last five years IIRC. My Sony A7-III doesn't have that, for example. Neither modern Canons, AFAIK.
The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box.
So if you are going to use your camera for production which you'll earn money, you need to pay commercial licenses for your cameras.
Hilarious. Reminds me of Pioneer CDJs as well, even on the flagship CDJ-3000 models. If you read the user manual it says:
> About using MP3 files
> This product has been licensed for nonprofit use. This product has not been licensed for commercial purposes (for profit-making use), […].
You need to acquire the corresponding licenses for such uses. For details, see […]
The format itself is patent-unencumbered. That doesn't mean I couldn't still write a non-free decoder and license it to Pioneer for use in their CDJs. Due to organizational inertia, I suspect that's what's going on here (e.g., they licensed a decoder from Fraunhofer or another commercial implementer twenty years ago, and have been using the same one since).
In this case, everyone at Pioneer knows their CDJs are used almost exclusively for commercial purposes, and perhaps they couldn't get away with lying about it in the fine print.
> The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box.
Do you have a link? Could only find a 2010 article[1] that appears to have been debunked by MPEG-LA themselves (per the updates in the blog post).
Of course. Below a selection of some user manuals, with the texts copied verbatim.
From Nikon D500 User Manual [0], page 22:
From Nikon Z6/Z7 User Manual [1], page 236:
Sony has a similar note for A9 [3], but can be grouped under here, which is almost the same:
AVC Patent Portfolio License:
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL
AND NON - COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH
THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/ OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND / OR WAS
OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS
GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. S EE http://www.mpegla.com
From Canon R5 User Manual [2], page 939:
“This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for
encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was
encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider
licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted
or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.”
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
STANDARD (''AVC VIDEO'') AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY
A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
Thanks. Yeah that seems to be the same AVC/h.264 'personal and non-commercial' text the 2010 article I linked centered on. MPEG-LA spoke to Engadget[1] (finally found a working link I could read) and said that a separate license for shooting commerical video isn't required and that distribution of commercial content via licensed providers (Google/Youtube, Apple, etc) is fine.
It seems the one caveat, per the Engadget article, is directly distributing AVC video to end users (I suppose like a direct download link on a personal site) is what requires a license but that license is free to obtain.
I looked around VIA-LA (which acquired MPEG-LA in 2023), and I can't see any free licenses about H.264. "Request a license" gives you an e-mail address, and that's it.
There are other license models, which is about manufacturers, publishers and TV stations, etc.
But nowhere it says "there's a free license for these cases, just get it from here".
I wonder what the commercial licenses actually cost. I know there was a big movement of shooting movies and events with canons when good video on dslrs first became a thing. I never even thought about codec licenses, because that stuff shouldn't exist. the manufacturer should buy the license so the camera can use it forever, because its just a paperweight without it, and I dont think they should be able to sell cameras with hidden text licenses like that.
This is a problem with 'prosumer' gear in general. If camera manufactures bought a transferable commercial license for everything in it, it would be too expense for consumer use, but the people licensing IP to them want a piece if you are making money with it.
Similar to software that is free or low cost for non-commercial use only, even with the same functionality.
The good news is typically nobody will chase you down on this unless you are making real money. The bad news is, once you are, they will.
Nominally, yes. These are checked before your movie is being distributed, and you'll most probably face legal consequences if you don't pay for your licenses.
Not getting caught for some time doesn't count either. You'll pay retroactively, with some interest, probably.
Licensing page is at [0]. Considering the previous shenanigans they pulled against open video and audio formats in the past [1], these guys are not sleeping around. These guys call people for patent pools in a format, and license these pools as format licenses.
If you bought a legit licensed product the doctrine of first sale means their patent rights are exhausted.[0] They can't come after you for patent infringement. Those licenses are for manufacturers making new licensed products, not users of licensed products they purchased.
Can you show a single court case or even a press release where someone using a legit licensed product bought on the open market was sued for codec patent infringement?
The license doesn't come attached to the device itself, but you as a entity (e.g. movie studio, broadcaster, or solo professional). Transferring the device doesn't transfer the license.
You license the right to use the patent pool for commercial purposes, not the device itself.
Back in the day Kodak had to buy back all their instant cameras after losing to Polaroid. Though I'm not sure if law has changed since then (it has, but I'm not sure if in relevant ways), or just that they did that because no being able to make film made them useless and so buyback was a goodwill gesture.
I believe this is why a number of products require you to manually activate a free personal license (by clicking a button and agreeing to TOS) in the settings instead of shipping with it. You are then separately licensing the tech from the software vendor and are personally liable for infringements.
First sale doctrine doesn't exist in my country for anything involving software, as business and business-adjacent software requires compulsory copyright registration and compulsory per-copy government-registered identifier here.
Presumably there's no way of fingerprinting the footage itself as 'unlicenced' so the closest they get is asking the studio what camera serials they used to film.
What about if you're a YouTuber, surely they don't pay?
I’m not sure. Like how color printers write their serial numbers and date and whatnot on every page, these devices might be watermarking every video subtly, and we might not know it.
It’s not exactly watermarking; each encoder works in a different way and it’s readily possible to determine (for one versed in such matters) which encoder was used to generate a video by inspecting the structure of the raw (eg h264) bitstream. This might not work reliably enough for simpler codecs like JPEG but for something as complicated as modern video codec where there are a million ways to generate a compatible payload it is as unique as a fingerprint.
That’s true, but I thought of embedding a serial number and a date into the video, periodically, for example, which can be quantized as noise, but not very visible unless you filter the frame a very specific way, or pass through a tool.
It’s fairly useless since raw footage isn’t typically distributed; it would be re-encoded first which would definitely destroy that watermark. So it would be a scandal that doesn’t necessarily accomplish much.
Silly restrictions aside, I feel that most use cases don't have takes longer than 30min anyway (I mean, on cameras that you actually start and stop recording manually)
But yeah technology evolves and the taxes remain. (Though don't complain too much or they will just pick the higher taxes for the newer cameras)
Streaming is a major use case where the camera may be recording continuously for several hours at a time. Another one is for video meetings, though in that case I’d prefer it if my camera forced the end of the meeting after 30 mins.
> I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously
Large sensors optimized for still photography overheat when operating continuously for video, so they feature safety limits. Sensor heat dissipation is a big problem and a major differentiating feature of top end cinema cameras.
My Sony doesn’t have this length limit, but will readily overheat and turn off after several minutes of highest-bitrate recording. So no, overheating is trivially protected against via temperature sensors, not some arbitrary timeout.
I seem to recall that there is a special button sequence you can use on Canon cameras that disabled the restriction. It’s. Been many years, but Google should have something for your model.
Reminds me of the Indian public discourse when the government wanted to tax caramel popcorn in movie theatres at 18% when the normal ones were taxed at 5%.
Funnily enough, I have actually used the 30 minute limit as a "feature" on my Panasonic Lumix G80 (the cousin to the unrestricted G85) as sometimes I would want to set up my camera and leave it recording for 20-30 minutes while I walked away to do things but wouldn't physically be able to return to switch it off. It would save me battery and SD card space because it automatically stops after 30 minutes.
It may have been a customs and taxation issue here, but manufacturers are constantly adding costs of their own onto software before often reversing track.
Examples: Leica (for Fotos) charged a princely sum for various trifles before removing these fees.
Naim: charged £35 for the control app - which I paid - before going free, and now the app is the only way to control whole swathes of their increasingly-execrable hardware.
These two companies’ kit is expensive, luxury, premium, however you want to refer to it, and so they probably felt comfortable wringing their customers a little more. Probably understandable in the case of Leica owners who will pay £250 for a viewfinder dioptre correction lens (puts hand up again) but less so for hifi owners.
It is not that audiophiles haven’t been shown to spent inordinate sums on the dumbest, snakiest, oiliest tat this side of an Oxford Street souvenir shop, but it has to be material and palpable.
It’s somewhat subjective, but I disagree it’s easier to fleece photographers than audiophiles. There are professional art photographers that use Leica cameras because they’re great, and $250 is pocket change for a lot of serious optical equipment. Look at the Canon L lenses and the like. Lots of people that buy that stuff don’t need it, but it’s not expensive solely for the sake of being expensive.
I have yet to find a professional sound engineer, producer, or artist that calls themself an audiophile or uses the insanely overpriced gear marketed to them. Lots of that stuff is demonstrably bullshit and only valuable because it’s expensive.
There was a custom ROM for canon available quite a few years ago... Now all I can find is https://www.magiclantern.fm/ but I believe the previous one was called CHDK or something like that
In Germany, all storage products (e.g. USB sticks) have to pay a canon "because you could use it to pirate media". Now, if I pre-paid the canon for pirating, does it mean I'm authorized to?
In Belgium, the same tax is raised by Auvibel for private copying. It allows us, in theory, to make copies of everything (except sheet music) that we acquired legally, even if we don't have access to the original anymore. So lending anything from a library or a friend, and making and keeping a copy is fair game.
Still not a fan, and probably the EUCD makes most of this useless.
Yes it does. You have a customs desk at every entry port, complete with a “goods to declare” sign. If you buy stuff online, you’ll also have to pay up if the products are taxed.
We also have VAT (sales tax) which is levied on top of the import duties (so the tax is taxed).
There are even restrictions on the quantities of some products you are allowed to carry between member states, such as alcohol and tobacco, mostly because taxes on those vary by jurisdiction.
There's the well-known case of Spain in 1985, that would impose a tariff on computers with 64 KB RAM or less. At that time, Amstrad launched the CPC 464 with 64KB worldwide, but for Spain launched the special model CPC 472, wich had a daughter board with an additional 8Kb chip not connected to the main RAM and thus unusable, but enough for circumventing the tariff. That tariff was short-lived.
That tariff difference between "video" and "stills" cameras having a 30 minute cutoff is funny. If you think about the vast majority of the time when shooting moving video with a handheld or tripod mounted camera it does not involve 30+ minute long continuous takes. You could have a professional movie camera with that restriction and it wouldn't be a problem in the vast majority of cases.
So the restriction ends up being between things like security cameras, vtc cameras, and traffic cameras vs all other times of cameras. The relatively shitty camera in a doorbell or on your dashboard end up being more expensive to import than the fancy DSLR just because it is used in a different application.
This happens even outside electronics and software. I ordered some tevas recently to replace my old ones and discovered they now have a light felt layer over the rubber bottom. If I had to guess its like the converse reason of adding a similar felt layer: to classify them as slippers.
It's just a business model like segmentation IMHO. BMWs or Tesla's having the hardware but require a payment for enabling it or CPU manufacturers disabling certain features to sell them at a lower price. IIRC the idea is that to let people pay what they can so you can have larger profits when allowing lower price points. In this case it appears to directly charge for a service(a software that needs to be created and maintained) that you may choose not to have.
I don't have problem with these practices at all as long as they don't try to prevent it you from running your hardware through alternative means. If the camera police isn't trying to get you for writing your own software to avoid paying Canon 5$ a month, its all good.
> Companies squeezing every last penny out out their customers is no news. And Canon is no stranger.
In relation to the rent-seeking behavior of Canon they allegedly nudged a certain open-source camera firmware project not to support some of their most high-end cameras. But with Canon losing interest in DSLRs I hope the situation changes.
In case you are considering Nikon as an alternative, their Webcam Utility might be free, but it doesn't work on the latest version of macOS.
There are 3rd party utilities (paid), but I had trouble with autofocus when I tried them.
I wish camera manufacturers put half as much effort into usability as smartphone companies. Why does a camera need drivers to be recognized as a webcam at all? Why doesn't my 2000€ camera come with GPS and LTE built in? Why is the software still as crappy as in the 90ies?
Nikon has been killing it lately. Z8, Z9, Z6iii, lots of cool lenses! If you're in the market for a full frame body and "the holy trinity" (16-35, 24-70, 70-200 F/2.8), you can't go wrong with any of the major 3. They're all very competitive.
(but I would go with the Sony because I like their designs the most, Nikon would be my 2nd choice)
Nikon users are missing out on a 16-35 2.8 though, but I'm sure Nikon is working on it.
I've only ever used Nikon starting with a D40 ~20 years ago. I regularly still use my D7100, but primarily use my Z5. The only time I'm ever envious of another camera system is when connection options like this come up. But then I go out and take pictures and I'm reminded why I'm probably Nikon for life :)
Same, i also got a "remote clicker" cable, and have modified the button to always stay pressed, so it does not switch off after MAX_TIME (camera model D3300)
The problem is that right now, you need to install a Nikon Spyware app on your smartphone if you want geotagged photos.
If the camera had GPS built-in, you could have geo-tagged photos without needing spyware on your phone.
Geotagged photos are extremely useful, there's a reason why they sell GPS dongles for cameras. Cameras really should have that built-in (and I think the top-of-the-line models do)
Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed from the HDMI-out in the camera? Most decent capture cards also expose themselves as cameras to almost all applications. This is my setup, and it works perfectly. Nikon D7500 as a webcam. More professional setups use Atomos monitors with built-in NVMe drives mounted directly to the camera.
I generally find the camera manufacturers' in-house programs absolutely terrible. Nikon's webcam utility is free[1], but has significant limitations over the capture card setup. Likewise for Sony. Both have considerable resolution and framerate limits, and I'd rather feed a 4K 60 FPS stream into my meeting program and let it handle the compression than have an XGA 1024×768 15 FPS output from the camera.
The principle is to use the right tool for the job.
USB can do just about anything. Video out is one possibility. But HDMI can already do that.
It doesn't make sense to expect the manufacturer to provide a free app to make USB do something you can already do over HDMI, and for which HDMI is intended.
This article is rage bait where there's no real cause for outrage. But it's adjacent enough to "right to repair" and "subscription fatigue" that it sounds outrageous.
On these cameras, HDMI is the right tool for the job. USB video quality is often poor where it's supported, and HDMI is there for video output.
These cameras are not made to be webcams. OP is using theirs as one, and that's fine; I do too. But device-side compression for USB video out, a webcam app, etc. are webcam features. They come at a cost, and many camera buyers don't need them.
For those of us using these cameras in these nonstandard ways, we can reach for HDMI, which is the right tool for this particular job.
The camera already have high-quality compression since it needs that to store video. If maybe latency is poor or other reasons exist not to use that then fine. HDMI can be a workaround, it still is an insanely bad tool for the job.
It's a workaround for the camera not bundling all the features that it needs to be a webcam, absolutely.
The standalone cameras I've used haven't included free webcam functionality and I don't think that's outrageous, but apparently many people here who've been downvoting me disagree.
Personally, I think HDMI is great for A/V tasks that a camera doesn't support out of the box since it's a widely supported standard.
Realtime compression in a portable device with limited processing power is going to reduce quality. It is better to transport uncompressed video and let the receiver decide how to manage it. USB-3 has adequate bandwidth for doing this. USB-C lets you switch to DisplayPort if the receiver can handle it.
The camera already does realtime compression to the sdcard. It has dedicated hardware for this. USB-2 has adequate bandwidth for compressed audio+video.
Your HDMI capture device (which is a cheap portable device with limited processing power) is probably going to do a much worse job.
I mean why invest $70 (and a lot of ressources) in hardware when, in theory, you have everything you need, the software is just locked behind a paywall?
But you generally don't have everything you need. As I've mentioned most cameras' USB webcam output (if at all present) is quite bad, even via the official programs or gphoto. The 'correct' way to access video output is through their, well, video-out port (usually HDMI), which almost necessitates a capture card or monitor.
Evidently these cameras are capable of exporting high quality video via USB, if you pay 5 bucks a month. This doesn't sound like a hardware problem. It also has a control channel, unlike HDMI.
> these cameras are capable of exporting high quality video via USB
No, they are not. The USB port is (usually) USB 2.0 and the video output, even though the application might claim 1080p 30 FPS, is a 'digital upscale'[1] from XGA or 720p. That in my view is decidedly not 'high quality'. My monitor has eight times that resolution and more than four times the framerate, totalling more than a 32× increase in bandwidth, and it is from 2021.
If users want high-quality video out from their pro cameras, use a capture card or monitor. That's how it's always been. As another commenter said, this article is rage-bait because the OP has purposely chosen a decidedly poorly-supported way to use their camera's functionality instead of the industry standard.
Fair enough -- though I'd take 720p from my DSLR over 1080p+ from my webcam every time; that's enough pixels for a meeting. And I also had to get a capture card for it, because the USB access was locked behind proprietary/shitty software (Sony).
Without loss of generality, the USB spec doesn't matter. The overwhelming majority of dedicated cameras are not set up to supply high-quality video output through their USB ports. Mass storage definitely and MTP, maybe, but video out? No, and even if you get it, it is badly nerfed. The industry standard is HDMI capture, or writing to disks in slots—whether SD, CF Express, or even M.2 NVMe.
This entire comment section is a massive storm in a teacup by photography and AV amateurs who don't know the ins and outs of AV work flows and assume that stuff should just work the way they want it to.
No, the industry standard, as has been pointed out to you multiple times by multiple different people, is USB-over-video. Something that a camera with a USB 3.1 port is more than capable of handling.
Just because you didn't bother to do any amount of research whatsoever before going on your unhinged rants does not suddenly make them any more relevant when talking about this specific camera. We're not talking about generally ("loss of generality" ok Jan ), we're talking about a specific blog post from a specific person talking about a specific camera.
The fact that you still don't understand this shows you clearly are not responding in any type of good faith here. It's your way or the highway even if your way is wildly outdated and not relevant.
You do, capture cards introduce latency something around 30-50ms (at least the cheaper ones) and if you are using non built in mic you need to resync everything up.
How easy and slick this setup will be depends on the camera.
For example, my camera can't operate and charge over USB at the same time, so you need a supplemental power supply. And it won't autofocus continuously or keep the exposure and white balance stable unless you're recording a video. And videos can only be so long.
So I've got a HDMI-to-USB converter, a special HDMI cable, a special power brick and adaptor, a special tripod so all those cables don't pull the whole setup over, and I've got to restart video recording every 30 minutes or so, and wipe the microsd card regularly.
Your camera's probably better suited to this than mine :)
None of my stills cameras focused continuously out of the box, probably to save power (moving potentially heavy lens elements around requires energy). My Olympus mirrorless can be told to focus all the time, but it's not the default.
I can force my (canon) camera to autofocus while not recording but usually you want to avoid that. It really hits the battery because the lens is permanentely adjusting.
Most mirrorless cameras a hybrids and you usually do not need this feature while takting stills.
Makes sense. On my sony camera (a7iv), it does continuous autofocus in video mode. You don't need to hit the record button - just set the focus mode to AFC (autofocus continuous) and it does its thing.
I also just tried connecting it as a webcam over USB, and it does continuous autofocus when set up like that too. I'm sure it uses more power, but the camera can power itself over the USB port while connected, so thats not a problem.
To be fair, I also have the dummy battery + HDMI capture + desktop clamp mount + live view faff for my D7500, but once you set it up it's just... there. I don't need to fiddle with it much further. It's a bit of a cable mess but I intend to upgrade to the Z6iii together with an upgrade to a desktop (so I can have a PCIe capture card), which will cut down the number of dongles all over.
I've been using a Sony mirrorless (anything above a5100 will work) for over 6 years now; it needed a "dummy battery", and an HDMI capture card (about $25 for noname brands, or $80+ for Elgato, BlackMagic etc). It auto-focuses, doesn't write to microsd, and works flawlessly.
For those who don't know, the dummy battery is a power cable with a battery-shaped adapter that plugs in where the battery would go to provide continuous power.
Weirdly I had the exact opposite experience. Elgato always felt laggy. I bought a no-name USB Stick format card and it looked great (once I got my camera settings dialed in) but would disconnect when I bumped my desk. I cracked the case open and soldered a USB cable I cut in half to the pads, and 3d printed a new case and it's been rock solid for the last 4 years. Only problem is the once in a blue moon I need to use Teams my video get's horizontally squished and I can't seem to fix it.
> Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed?
This is how I've used my Sony camera since COVID. It works great.
I wasn't sure at first if OP was trying to do something nonstandard, because you get video to your computer with a video cable. Plus a way for your computer to capture that, which for me is CamLink.
Honestly, I'm surprised there's a relevant manufacturer app at all. Not surprised that it costs money.
This is a bit like not having power in your home to charge your camera with and asking the manufacturer for a generator. They may have a solution, but the price will be bad.
Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?
It is already implemented, otherwise they wouldn't be able to enable it once the subscription is active.
Why should the OP need to pay a subscription to enable a feature that is build into the camera, that is a standard feature on other cameras and imposes no ongoing costs to the manufacturer¹? This is an example of gouging, pure and simple.
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[1] unless they are forcing the user to use their hosted service for steaming the webcam output, in which case there is some bandwidth and perhaps other processing cost, but that is on them for having not just implemented a standard that enables local-only recording
> Why should the OP need to pay a subscription to enable a feature that is build into the camera
Getting video into your computer through USB is _not_ built into the camera. Else why is OP downloading an app to do it?
The app is part of the implementation, and it costs money. I have no problem with the manufacturer charging separately for that. The rest of us can use a video cable to get video into our computers.
You are entirely ignoring the subscription for what should, at most, be a one-off cost.
> The app is part of the implementation
Give other cameras can do it, there has a standard for it since 2003, and there are F/OSS implementations for others, maybe I'm asking the wrong question and instead should have asked “why should the OP pay a subscription for their bad choice of how to implement the feature?”.
The company can charge whatever they want for this feature. Most people who can afford to use a good camera as their webcam will never use it, because they know the quality is worse and they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI.
If I asked Sony for a power generator to charge my camera's battery, they could charge me a million a month if they'd like. Hopefully that would signal to me that there are better and more standard options.
> The company can charge whatever they want for this feature.
They can. But that doesn't mean everyone is forced to be happy about it, and doesn't mean it can't be talked about so other people who might not be happy about it can use the information to chose a different camera from a different manufacturer instead of discovering the issue post-purchase.
> they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI
Or the industry standards for video-over-USB, that this manufacturer chose not to implement because they couldn't easily gouge a subscription out of it.
OP bought a camera not sold as a webcam and is trying to use it as a webcam. Fair enough, I've done the same.
A standard way of doing that is to use a video cable to get video output and plug that into a capture card on your computer. OP doesn't want to do that and would prefer that the manufacturer included webcam functionality out of the box.
Also fair enough! But if that's the requirement, buy a camera that meets that requirement, and understand that it's not a standard feature in these cameras.
I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on. It's getting outraged over expecting a camera to do what it wasn't designed to do, when there are already simple and standard ways of making it do that.
Requiring a separate kit made of HDMI cap box, and two usb cables (assuming the box power is feedable via usb) also makes canon create further e-waste. That's only because they're greedy and that stuff is already inside. And nothing on the site of the camera https://www.canon-europe.com/cameras/powershot-g5-x-mark-ii/... gives any indication that such external app and subscription would be required.
OP bought a camera, and the camera can be used as a webcam - but deliberately not with standard protocols. Pretending the limitation is of technical nature rather than a result of corporate greed is both delusional and harmful to consumer rights.
Nothing about this is deceptive or a violation of consumer rights. Far from it.
This is common for cameras. My Sony works in the same way. It can be used as a webcam using HDMI and a capture card. Canon clearly states this in their marketing for OP's camera.
OP apparently didn't understand this, but the solution is simple -- get an HDMI cable and a capture card.
> OP bought a camera not sold as a webcam and is trying to use it as a webcam. Fair enough, I've done the same. A standard way of doing that is…
And another standard way, supported by at least some cameras, without even single extra charge never mind a subscription⁰, is apparently video over USB.
> I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on.
No users are dying on this hill¹. OP is just stating, in an exasperated tone admittedly, what the state of affairs is with this camera. Some of us are agreeing with him that it seems off, and is part of the ongoing enshitification of the software and hardware worlds. Others can use this information to help guide their choice of camera (or supplier of other equipment), or not, their choice.
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[0] Which implies they could decide to discontinue the feature at a whim later, no matter how much the user has paid between now and then.
[1] I'll refrain² from mentioning that you are putting up quite a determined fight for the “nah, this sort of thing is fine, really” hill.
Also why does it have to be a subscription in the first place. If it is a non standard use that requires extra software you don't and you want to separate those costs from users that don't need it, then make it a one time payment at least.
Subscriptions make sense when you have ongoing costs like significant load on servers that are needed for the service provided. But not for some piece of software you write once and are more or less done with (minus some small patches)
That’s the really egregious thing. I think a bunch of programmers should be able to see the merit in charging money for software. It’s a bit of a bitter pill in a product that we mentally categorize as “device” rather than “computer” but it’s at least somewhat sensible. Software costs money to make, that money has to come from customers, and getting it from the customers who use it makes sense.
But requiring a subscription is such a blatant “fuck you, we want more profit without doing any work, and you’re going to provide it.”
USB 2.0, that bog standard version from 2000 that is assumed to be the lowest common denominator possible for any new hardware...
Edit: 4am math correction...
480Mbit/sec transfer; Uncompressed, that's ~333333 pixels per frame for 60FPS. Not even considering overhead, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class 1.1 support from 2005 includes Motion JPEG (low compression, all patents probably expired given it was developed in the 90s) and MPEG2 (also sufficiently old, to be unencumbered now).
However, if they'd use USB 3.0 ~ 5gbps, ideally over a USB-C port, the connection would be more modern, and easily able to handle even 4K video with now free from patents and well supported compression algorithms.
USB ${N}Gbps instead of the confusing old labels and operation mode classifications.
I'll assume you meant the 5Gbps version of the link, which ( 5000000000/8/3/60 ) can drive about 3.47M (24 bit) pixels at 60fps, even raw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_display_resolut... It looks like 4K mode would require the use of VP8 (likely no hardware included) or h264. Patent license issues are soon to expire, (though some BS one won't until 2030, not sure how that's even possible), but no remedy for older models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Licensin... drat.
OP is using a camera as a webcam that's not sold as a webcam. That's fine, I do the same with mine, but it's also fine of the manufacturer to allow for that by simply providing A/V interfaces instead of trying to account for every use case.
> Use the EOS Utility Webcam Beta Software (Mac and Windows) to turn your Canon camera into a high-quality webcam, or do the same using a clean HDMI output.
Marketing material changes over time and varies between models and regions. Canon customers bought their cameras because Canon advertised a set of features. I bought mine because Canon advertised that I could use it as a webcam. I don't think you're making a persuasive argument.
You still can use it as a webcam. It's right there in the marketing materials. Clean HDMI out. That lets you use it as a webcam.
Canon advertising its potential to be used as a webcam doesn't mean it's a webcam. It means you can adapt it for use as one. And you still can. The adapter is an HDMI cable or software, which may or may not be free.
I’ve been using this with a Fuji XT4 for last 2 years as webcam, working great.
Though for stuff like google meet, I usually set it to 1080p 60fps since that’s the max res most meeting software will accept anyways, and frame rate is more important for live meeting than res.
Oh, good to know! I didn't manage to find this one. But this one is $100 in the US, and $120 in some other places. Which is quite a bit of additional money to pay on top of your camera, which already has USB and should just provide a video stream there…
It's rage bait. People hate subscriptions, understandably so, and people without A/V experience might expect a camera not sold as a webcam to easily double as a webcam since they both can capture video.
It's just a really poor reason to be outraged at Canon (or Sony or any of the other companies whose non-webcam cameras don't seamlessly turn into webcams without some standard A/V adapters).
That's upsetting, but my point is the article itself is rage bait. It's not outrageous for Canon to charge for webcam software when there's HDMI video-out on the camera.
I can imagine supporting my right to charge my customers for the software I build for them, absolutely. And I support Canon's right to do the same.
Many of us have had the experience of clients telling us to "just" write code that they think is easy, but we know how that can go in reality.
There's already a simple solution here in HDMI. I don't see a reason to be outraged at Canon over not providing another solution that most buyers will never even use.
When I was trying to get back into photography, the fact that Sony's camera has built-in webcam capabilities played a small (but not trivial) part in choosing to invest in Sony's ecosystem. They're just great cameras overall, but I can't say it didn't play a part.
USB camera feeds work out of the box with Sony mirrorless cameras.
So ultimately, if Canon wants to play these games, let's see if the market of NEW buyers like me respond in a way that will make Canon change their minds.
Exactly. But why does he need to buy a USB capture card and HDMI cable? He can just hire someone to come and record the videos for him. They'll also do the post processing.
Why does he even even record the videos himself? He can just hire actors to do what he wants, probably a lot better.
And what's the whole thing with buying a camera? He should just buy a studio and hire a crew to manage all that stuff.
The outrage in this thread is incredible. Buying a couple A/V adapters to adapt a non-webcam camera into a webcam is somehow seen as a terrible burden.
If someone doesn't want to do that, perhaps they should buy...a webcam. No adapters needed.
A camera comes with more power at the cost of simplicity for this use case.
A capture card and HDMI cable together cost less than $100. Hiring someone will be at least an order of magnitude more expensive—and more so the more people you hire.
Eh? There's no slippery slope. A capture card is standard equipment for any broadcaster.
There is an absolutely massive gulf between a one-time supplementary purchase of $100 versus a multi-million dollar studio, film crew, actors. The comment was ludicrous, sorry.
> There's no slippery slope. A capture card is standard equipment for any broadcaster.
Guess what. OP isn't a broadcaster. Neither is the commenter. And everybody else here and their moms find it ludicrous that someone has to spend another X, where X is literally any amount over 0, to do something that the camera can already clearly do. In high quality. As evidenced by the existence of the software in the first place.
> The comment was ludicrous, sorry.
Yeah no shit Sherlock. That was the whole point. Are you actually this dense in real life or are you playing it up to be a troll?
This is hugely dependent on whether the camera supports clean HDMI output - that is, without overlays. My Canon camera for example insists on showing a focus square over HDMI no matter what, and it is impossible to disable.
Unfortunately there is no port of ML to my specific model. I did some porting work myself by running the camera firmware in QEMU, but to be able to run it on hardware I apparently needed some signing key that only the Magic Lantern lead dev has. By the time I was doing all of this he was busy with real world stuff so ultimately I just borrowed a friend's Nikon camera.
Talking about solutions: Camlink.
I use it with a very outdated camera for my online meetings. Works great and gave new life to a camera that I would throw away otherwise.
> I've tried this at first in 2024 with macOS 14, which did not work.
Why not blame Apple for not providing drivers? It is pretty normal in Linux to check hardware compatibility. You mainly buy hardware with good software support.
Apple does not support this camera, so do not buy it!
The question I have is why not make interoperability mandatory so both Apple and Canon have to make products that work with eachother instead of weird useless arbitrary rules?
It's like people love the horrible experience lol rather trauma than education type shit Leibniz was so beyond wrong about this smh
I have a few fuji cameras, and sadly their webcam software doesn't work for me, but for a cheap fix I bought a low-cost (~$10) HDMI USB capture card on AliExpress, and it works wonders.
664 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 431 ms ] thread$5 on a $6299 camera is nothing, just pay for it, petty but not really infuriating. Even at $500 I would simply pay should I need it. If I had reasons to buy a $6299 camera, it probably means a budget in the tens of thousands, for lenses, lighting, accessories, etc... $500 is peanuts by comparison.
But I certainly wouldn't want my very expensive setup to fail just because some server is down.
That probably makes it pretty easy to reverse engineer their software to bypass the restrictions.
I suppose I'm glad some people find time to do this.
Canon is a company that is in the business of making profit (not just software or just hardware).
If they realize that they can charge you $1 for every time you chew gum while taking photos, and people will actually pay for that privilege $1-per-chewing-gum-session (disclaimer: chewing gum not provided) they would charge you!
Remember BMW and heating in the UK (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208)??
Getting paid $6k for a camera once is good. Getting paid another $50 a year for doing nothing is even better.
I assume the great brain who came with the idea is: "we got 10 million cameras out there, if 0.5% of those camera owners pay $50 pa, then that's 10m x 0.5% x $50 = $2.5m pa. If I could get a 100k bonus for bringing $2.5m gross to my company I would also suggest this idea.
Good thing there's Sony and Nikon.
Historically video related field was one of the most patent and license encumbered. That's why AV1 exists.
Nikon seems to be the "good guy" these days.
The indie / startup space has been so all in on subscription revenue that I guess it's not a huge surprise that the big companies eventually tried to get in on the act.
They did make the "Imaging Edge Webcam" program, I think some time during the pandemic, but AFAIK it's just a PTP preview to webcam driver, so the quality is pretty terrible and you can do that with OBS+gphoto2.
My older Sony cameras (A6300 is my newest "old" Sony camera) don't have the feature (unless you use that terrible software you mentioned) Im surprised to read that even the reasonably modern A7SIII doesn't support it. It must be one of the last models without USB streaming support.
For older cameras, probably the easiest way to do it (if you don't want to install anything) is to pick up a ~$20 usb HDMI capture card from amazon. Connect the HDMI output on the camera to the capture card. And then set your camera up to output a "clean" video source via the HDMI port.
As I understand it, modern capture cards work without drivers on every OS, just like the modern sony cameras do.
For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job - something connecting direct to a network outputting NDI, or something with SDI output.
They mostly don't, though. The standard "high-end" streaming setup is whatever second-hand mirrorless camera has a clear HDMI output, and an HDMI capture card.
I guess they figured out a better way to do the accounting, since they never did that particular stunt again.
http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php
I'm able to pipe gphoto2 frames to a pipewire sink or v4l2 device and it works great for making my Canon EOS 250D into a webcam.
Edit: The camera he uses is a 2019 pocket camera. The 6299 must be another model that has the same restrictions.
In the fifth paragraph:
“Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6300 from the article's title, much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I'm describing translates to every other Canon camera model!”
Everything coming out of China is way more customer friendly, usually way cheaper and getting better and better to a point that they are surpassing everything else that exists. If DJI releases a full-frame mirrorless camera with L-mount (which they are going to), Canon, Nikon, Fuji and all these companies with firmware from the 90s will die and I am not going to miss them.
They have made absolutely no effort to provide any value and a whole lot of tacit collusion is going on. They still sell you SD cards instead of including an SSD which would be MUCH cheaper and faster. Same with battery technology. Compatibility, apps, software... everything.
You can choose your suppliers by other measures than merely price. Arguably, you should if the market you are particupating in is not free and fair in this way.
Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts, I see no reason to switch to a Chinese brand (well, also there is no product that beats it on both specs and price, but even if there was I would think twice). People tend to over-generalize, but reality is not as simple as “all manufacturers from %country1% are better because X and all manufacturers from %country2% suffer from issue Y”.
[0] https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=113...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/south-korea-indic...
[2] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-07-19/busines...
For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar.
Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better start to copy the Chinese if they want to stay competitive, but instead of doing that, they push for the same kind of tariff protections for which the US heavily criticized any other country in the past and blackmailed them in various ways to force them to remove the tariff protections against US companies.
But I got a DJI Ronin (handheld gimbal) the other day. Its a gamechanger. With the camera mounted on the gimbal, I can do handheld shots that you could easily use in a blockbuster movie.
The only downside is that the whole thing (camera + gimbal) is a very awkward package. The weight is in the wrong place. And that means the gimbal needs to be bigger and bulkier to compensate - which in turn makes it even more awkward to use. You could make a much better product by integrating the gimbal and camera. Put just the lens and sensor on the gimbal, but move the screen, battery and CPU to the "outside" package. Then you could shrink the gimbal itself and remove all the mounting hardware and manual weight adjustment sliders.
Apparently DJI has started making $10k cinema cameras along exactly these lines. I really hope the Japanese camera brands take notice. From a product standpoint, its a big deal - and I'm sure it won't be long before DJI makes much cheaper video cameras that start seriously eating Sony & Canon's market share.
Everyone is a thief.
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
That was Japan's game to lose and their loss was absolutely deserved. Japanese companies are more interested in bickering with each other, while Korean and Chinese companies have bigger worldly goals.
Japan Display[1] and Renesas[2] could have been the LG/Samsung had Japan realized much sooner that there are better things to be doing than dragging each other down.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Display
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renesas_Electronics
Japanese companies spent time and money investing in new technologies and then proceeded to waste them because they were far more interested in keeping trade secrets to themselves and dragging each other down, rather than coming together and acting as one national industry like Korean and Chinese companies. The Japanese companies did come together eventually (Japan Display, et al.), but way too late.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/25/tsmc_samsung_espionag...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/samsung-hit-with-303-mln-jury-...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-sams...
Which camera is that?
I don't think the power draw of an SSD plays well with the current battery tech.
Plus most user value the fact that you can rapidly swap those thing. The last thing you want to do during a wedding is having to wait for the data to transfer and/or the battery to recharge.
The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt.
Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it would appear that owning something that could physically do what you want it to is only half the battle for numerous reasons, and in this case it would have been my government demanding extra money to 'unlock' this functionality.
In short, there is no good reason anymore, but originally this was because of EU import tarifs.
It’s a joke.
E.g. study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3860576/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium is used to make it unpalatable. Fun fact: the same chemical is also coated onto Nintendo Switch cartridges to discourage children from putting them in their mouths.
Nowadays we just measure pressure differentials.
Methanol sales were banned in Finland prior to EU and Finland applied for the exemption already in the EU application in the early 1990s. It was finally granted in 2019. Probably around 500 people died and many got blinded meanwhile.
https://yle.fi/a/3-7841018
If you close your nose the taste is just bitter, but bearable. The additives are supposed to make you vomit, but for me I only had vomit reflex for ~5 seconds after swallowing. I could live with that if I was addicted and couldn't afford a regular alcohol. I'm sure many people do.
Not sure what the moral is. I guess that addiction is a really strong motivator, and tax evasion is not a good enough reason to justify killing people with poison.
I suppose wormwood is an acquired taste, but it's one I happen to like. They still put it in many different bitters here in Sweden.
The post pointing this out has different content to yours, which reads as if your meaning is “this reminds me of another bad thing caused by tax policies” - even if that’s not what you meant.
But I also never said OP’s anecdote was a bad thing. (Why shouldn’t countries be able to tax video cameras coming in…). What’s the difference?
But of course as you say it's largely semantics.
This assumes everyone acts in good faith.
A popular one these days is the "gun show 'loophole.'"
Rather than calling it "renegging on an explicitly-legislated compromise", it's a "loophole" that needs "closing."
It looks like a loophole, it could be in the textbook describing them. You have a law that establishes a rule, then creates a small exception that in effect opts out of the rule entirely. The people who want this provision eliminated don't know it was intended. That's pretty in the weeds of congress' internal negotiations
> You're assigning a single mind to a group of uncoordinated actors to create a hypocrisy that probably doesn't exist in any specific individual.
POSIWID
Now, it might be reasonable to remove this exemption, but the only way it's a "gunshow" loophole is that gun shows are a place where gun fans wanting to buy are going to meet gun fans wanting to sell.
Making it trivial for someone to do firearms checks seems like an easy thing that everyone should support, but alas no one in power seems to actually want such a thing.
If we negotiate and make a binding deal, I need to believe you will hold your end of the agreement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
I have never seen this as anything other than the death penalty for evading taxes. If the tax were designed to reduce consumption across the population, it needs to scale with income or net worth. Otherwise, it's just a tax on the poor.
This "oil" is basically diesel. It smells and feels identical to diesel. But it's about 70 cents cheaper per litre compared to road diesel. It's dyed red, and you are not supposed to put it in your car, but I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines.
The red diesel is not taxed like road diesel, and is much cheaper.
There's always the risk of getting your fuel tank dipped if you're on road. Moreso for trucks, but some jurisdictions will set up inspections and check for dyed fuel and tear you an absolute new one when they catch it.
Though primarily done to trucks, there are occasional fuel tests done by police. Even if your tank is currently clean, they'll occasionally pull out the fuel filters and check those for dye.
I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.
Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.
Refs:
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyleft_trolling
Easy money...
As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?
Those bands are not famous but despite making sales, they only get a few bucks every year, or it’s the SACEM saying "we forgot to send you the check lol, no biggies." It’s the biggest legal mafia I can think of right now.
Most of the money collected is sent to huge artists (like what Spotify is doing), there is nothing indie about it even if they pretend it’s for the glory of French music.
It's the same idea as to why reducing the amount of means-testing and other hoops to jump to get social benefits would save taxpayers money - sure, more people who don't need benefits would get them, but that's more than offset by what would be saved by eliminating the workload of (and government jobs dedicated to) gate-keeping those benefits.
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.
Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?
> blank media
But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.
> the alternative is that you are not allowed
But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.
This issue does not appear weird.
There is some legally technical difference between a video camera and a still photo camera. Probably different tariffs or something. Not weird at all and it is not uncommon anywhere in the world for different classes och products to be classified differently, infallibly because of industry lobbyism to reduce their costs or to reduce their prices for their specific product.
The manufacturer chose to limit the product for the consumer for their own economic benefit. Nothing is stopping them from playing ball except their own profit motive.
It is I the customer who will pay the tariffs (they are always paid by the importer) - the manufacturer gets the same amount per unit.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/eu-to-hit-some-di...
No, I think it's to protect the European producer of devices that can do more from being out-competed by imports.
If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.
I'd still have to pay tax on it, though. IIRC there wasn't any personal exemption amount if you'd left Canada for under 24 hours, unlike they have now. Sometimes they'd just wave you through even when trying to declare something, which was always a nice little bonus savings.
To a (considerable) extent yes. But it appears to be going backwards - from 2021 online shops have had to know and apply VAT for a product to the buyers country, not the country in which they are based, and thresholds for charging and submitting this VAT were eliminated. Basically handing over more online retail to the likes of Amazon.
Different products have different VAT rates in each country, the only thing that can't be discriminated on is the (EU) country of origin. This is still absolutely susceptible to the whims of political favour and local industry lobbying. A recent example from Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087643
[Admittedly I'm unlikely to be buying chocolate and crisps online from Germany, but if I were a German seller needs to charge the correct rate of VAT for each, which will likely be different from Germany and every other EU country]
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...
That is an acceptable position and you will likely nor require further investigation as long as the criticism remains vague and is offset by positive sentiment. I too love the EU.
After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.
I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.
But tons of money coming in from the EU. I can imagine a lot of public quiet, private ‘angst’ about the kind of situation you’re describing.
Wild guess - Romania? (If not Bulgaria)
My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.)
There's also the famous Jaffa Cake case, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status , but I think the Subway one has an extra element of absurdity because it went all the way to the _Supreme Court_.
Because it is not. Cola is not water either.
Without the EU, there would be a worse patchwork of rules and exceptions.
Tariffs around the world have weird stuff like that. Very little to do with the EU itself. Expect a lot more weird things like that to happen in the US now with the new US government implementing new tariffs.
Huh? It may have dipped at the time Netflix had everything streamable, but there's been a resurgence in the now years since it hasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-why-your-c...
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/02/snuggies-ar...
The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."
Raw ingredients are taxed less than ready-to-eat or sugar-coated ultra-processed good. And I'm totally ok with that.
So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-63281037
I also expected somebody from this community to enlight me :)
This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.
The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.
15% of a $33 shirt is $5
5% of a $33 jacket is $1.65
...it's definitely gamesmanship but if you squint you can see where it comes from.
How much tax for a laser printer? Well it depends how fast it prints:
Up to 14 pages/Minute: 25,00 € Up to 39 pages/Minute: 50,00 € From 40 pages/Minute: 87,50 €
For every storage medium this tax has been paid, because of the possibility of making a pirated copy. Technically we all paid already to make pirates copies.
0. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe
It has upsides like having an army for defense, roads and other common things. But don’t forget the primary nature and motivation behind it. They just want your money, and your offspring to please them in various ways.
"It's a nice story and the court won't prevent you from telling it, but legally these beings in that story are clearly NOT humans"
Hilarious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_BRAT
https://www.ft.com/content/5af5b182-349a-4a25-b4fb-4551908f2...
https://www.ft.com/content/a6a54008-6059-4052-99ae-282f148f2...
https://www.ft.com/content/a8d6413e-1184-4f89-9bcb-4f6cb8d7a...
[1]: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-compan...
Mallowpuffs are so much better than tea cakes. Squiggles, Tim tams, chit chats, sultana pasties, griffins macaroons, toffee pops, hundreds and thousands, mint slice.
Whereas here it's mostly shortbread or bourbons/custard creams.
Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.
So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...
My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.
It would make sense why he’s never even jokingly gone back into that character on his new show.
Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.
This is not that case.
In popular media when "The Colbert Report" was broadcast, Steven Colbert was very open about the fact that he was playing a character on TV who happened to have the same name as him.
In the case of "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert," he is not playing the character from the Colbert Report.
The very specific bit was from after the 2017 election when Trump was elected. Steven Colbert did a bit, in character as "Steven Colbert", with props from "The Colbert Report", and a guest appearance from Jon Stewart. (Because the main focus of "The Colbert Report" was to mock conservatives.) Otherwise, everything Steven Colbert (the person) does on "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert" does not involve the "Steven Colbert" character from "The Colbert Report."
Craig Kilborn was able to leave the Daily Show and take bits like 5 questions with him. However, CC was a much smaller network at the time.
Nobody should have been getting their "news" from Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow.
IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.
> IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.
Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.
Meanwhile, OAN sued Maddow for calling them Russian propaganda and her lawyers responded by flexing, doubling down with receipts under oath. Signing up for consequences if they were wrong, and receiving none because they were correct.
So no, these are not the same, and anyone who argues that they are immediately reveals themselves to be partisan hacks.
They are literally the same with one case having a text message.
They are both not news and if you think that one and not the other is news than you might be the partisan you are trying to label others as.
[Judge Smith] found OAN and its parent company were unlikely to prevail on the defamation claim because the challenged speech was not a statement of fact and the context of Maddow’s show made it likely her audience would expect her to make political opinions.
Putting the details of the court case aside, the judge is clearly saying that he does not believe that Maddow's show was "news" and it shouldn't be treated as such. That's what GP was pointing out: the defense of being "not news", which both shows have in common.
> the context provided by Maddow’s commentary before and after she made the statement disclosed all relevant facts and contained colorful language.
If you listen to the clip in question, you'll observe that Maddow explains the facts, makes an exclamation, and then explains the facts. The complaint here only works if you clip chimp the exclamation. Contrast this with the complaint against Carlson, where he engages in what was by his own admission sustained deception.
I think the 'average' person thinks of 'Entertainment News' as celebrity gossip, e.g., E! News[0] etc. Telling them the entertainment news/opinion/commentary they watch is not actually 'News' but is entertainment "news" doesn't compute
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E!_News
Like WWE is Sports Entertainment.
I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.
That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.
[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...
Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.
If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]
If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.
I am deeply offended and contemplating to sue you for defamation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandco...
The UK's exemption from VAT covers lots of things, but not an entirely logical selection: cakes are considered staples and are exempt, but drinks (including soft drinks, beer and mineral water) are taxed at the full 20% rate.
In general, I would personally prefer that the UK not have VAT, as it's a regressive tax (people with lower incomes pay a greater percentage of their income on it than high earners do).
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...
The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.
Walkers lost the case.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/walkers-min...
Hah.
Isn't that true though?
https://www.magiclantern.fm/
The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box.
So if you are going to use your camera for production which you'll earn money, you need to pay commercial licenses for your cameras.
Hah.
[I jest, but these were almost literally the questions being asked by various commissions]
> About using MP3 files
> This product has been licensed for nonprofit use. This product has not been licensed for commercial purposes (for profit-making use), […]. You need to acquire the corresponding licenses for such uses. For details, see […]
Best use an open audio codec instead.
You will still need a separate license (or multiple separate licenses) for commercial purposes.
Music licensing is unbelievably complicated
Do you have a link? Could only find a 2010 article[1] that appears to have been debunked by MPEG-LA themselves (per the updates in the blog post).
[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/23236/why-our-civilizations-vid...
From Nikon D500 User Manual [0], page 22:
From Nikon Z6/Z7 User Manual [1], page 236:
Sony has a similar note for A9 [3], but can be grouped under here, which is almost the same:
AVC Patent Portfolio License: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/ OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND / OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. S EE http://www.mpegla.com
From Canon R5 User Manual [2], page 939:
“This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.”
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (''AVC VIDEO'') AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
[0]: https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive3/4qUKV00WD5Bh04RdeC...
[1]:https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive5/8Yygr00R9Ojb058Kwq...
[2]: https://cam.start.canon/en/C003/manual/c003.pdf
[3]: https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/1830/v1/en/contents/TP0002351...
It seems the one caveat, per the Engadget article, is directly distributing AVC video to end users (I suppose like a direct download link on a personal site) is what requires a license but that license is free to obtain.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-04-know-your-rights-h-264-p...
There are other license models, which is about manufacturers, publishers and TV stations, etc.
But nowhere it says "there's a free license for these cases, just get it from here".
This all looks like a rabbit hole for me.
Similar to software that is free or low cost for non-commercial use only, even with the same functionality.
The good news is typically nobody will chase you down on this unless you are making real money. The bad news is, once you are, they will.
Not getting caught for some time doesn't count either. You'll pay retroactively, with some interest, probably.
Licensing page is at [0]. Considering the previous shenanigans they pulled against open video and audio formats in the past [1], these guys are not sleeping around. These guys call people for patent pools in a format, and license these pools as format licenses.
[0]: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/avc-h-264/avc-h-264-licen...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#Criticism
Can you show a single court case or even a press release where someone using a legit licensed product bought on the open market was sued for codec patent infringement?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
You license the right to use the patent pool for commercial purposes, not the device itself.
Edit: Missed the last part where you said the same
What about if you're a YouTuber, surely they don't pay?
But yeah technology evolves and the taxes remain. (Though don't complain too much or they will just pick the higher taxes for the newer cameras)
So they just publish some activation code on some consumer forum somewhere and from then on it's the consumer's responsibility.
I think they did the same thing with DVD region restrictions.
Speaking as an amateur photographer with multiple DSLRs: I’ve certainly needed longer than that for a number of gigs.
Large sensors optimized for still photography overheat when operating continuously for video, so they feature safety limits. Sensor heat dissipation is a big problem and a major differentiating feature of top end cinema cameras.
Examples: Leica (for Fotos) charged a princely sum for various trifles before removing these fees.
Naim: charged £35 for the control app - which I paid - before going free, and now the app is the only way to control whole swathes of their increasingly-execrable hardware.
These two companies’ kit is expensive, luxury, premium, however you want to refer to it, and so they probably felt comfortable wringing their customers a little more. Probably understandable in the case of Leica owners who will pay £250 for a viewfinder dioptre correction lens (puts hand up again) but less so for hifi owners.
It is not that audiophiles haven’t been shown to spent inordinate sums on the dumbest, snakiest, oiliest tat this side of an Oxford Street souvenir shop, but it has to be material and palpable.
I have yet to find a professional sound engineer, producer, or artist that calls themself an audiophile or uses the insanely overpriced gear marketed to them. Lots of that stuff is demonstrably bullshit and only valuable because it’s expensive.
I believe that under 30 minutes, allows it to be a digicam, but over, requires it to be classified as a video camera.
Most pros generally take scenes as groups of short runs, so that doesn't matter (Canon is used extensively in professional entertainment).
It looks like they have firmware for the G5 X, but not the G5 X 2. :/
Still not a fan, and probably the EUCD makes most of this useless.
My (now ancient) Canon 5D mk2 is limited to ~28 minutes of video due to file system limitations.
You can learn about those here: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs-4/calculation-...
We also have VAT (sales tax) which is levied on top of the import duties (so the tax is taxed).
There are even restrictions on the quantities of some products you are allowed to carry between member states, such as alcohol and tobacco, mostly because taxes on those vary by jurisdiction.
So the restriction ends up being between things like security cameras, vtc cameras, and traffic cameras vs all other times of cameras. The relatively shitty camera in a doorbell or on your dashboard end up being more expensive to import than the fancy DSLR just because it is used in a different application.
I don't have problem with these practices at all as long as they don't try to prevent it you from running your hardware through alternative means. If the camera police isn't trying to get you for writing your own software to avoid paying Canon 5$ a month, its all good.
By the way, your images go to a weird url for me, maybe it is because it is Brave browser.
For example
https://romanzipp.com/blog/[%7B%22id%22:%22assets::blog//no-...
In relation to the rent-seeking behavior of Canon they allegedly nudged a certain open-source camera firmware project not to support some of their most high-end cameras. But with Canon losing interest in DSLRs I hope the situation changes.
There are 3rd party utilities (paid), but I had trouble with autofocus when I tried them.
I wish camera manufacturers put half as much effort into usability as smartphone companies. Why does a camera need drivers to be recognized as a webcam at all? Why doesn't my 2000€ camera come with GPS and LTE built in? Why is the software still as crappy as in the 90ies?
(but I would go with the Sony because I like their designs the most, Nikon would be my 2nd choice)
Nikon users are missing out on a 16-35 2.8 though, but I'm sure Nikon is working on it.
macOS Ventura version 13 macOS Monterey version 12 macOS Big Sur version 11
2 seconds later on HN: why does my 2000€ camera spies on me? If you want a smartphone, use one, leave us be with our sane tools.
If the camera had GPS built-in, you could have geo-tagged photos without needing spyware on your phone.
Geotagged photos are extremely useful, there's a reason why they sell GPS dongles for cameras. Cameras really should have that built-in (and I think the top-of-the-line models do)
I wish Nikon would just include useful features like USB webcam mode out of the box.
I generally find the camera manufacturers' in-house programs absolutely terrible. Nikon's webcam utility is free[1], but has significant limitations over the capture card setup. Likewise for Sony. Both have considerable resolution and framerate limits, and I'd rather feed a 4K 60 FPS stream into my meeting program and let it handle the compression than have an XGA 1024×768 15 FPS output from the camera.
[1]: https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products/548/Webca...
USB can do just about anything. Video out is one possibility. But HDMI can already do that.
It doesn't make sense to expect the manufacturer to provide a free app to make USB do something you can already do over HDMI, and for which HDMI is intended.
This article is rage bait where there's no real cause for outrage. But it's adjacent enough to "right to repair" and "subscription fatigue" that it sounds outrageous.
The video feed should (depending on usecase, sure) be compressed on the device and sent over USB.
Sending uncompressed video just to be badly compressed in a capture device is most definitely not the right tool for the job.
These cameras are not made to be webcams. OP is using theirs as one, and that's fine; I do too. But device-side compression for USB video out, a webcam app, etc. are webcam features. They come at a cost, and many camera buyers don't need them.
For those of us using these cameras in these nonstandard ways, we can reach for HDMI, which is the right tool for this particular job.
The standalone cameras I've used haven't included free webcam functionality and I don't think that's outrageous, but apparently many people here who've been downvoting me disagree.
Personally, I think HDMI is great for A/V tasks that a camera doesn't support out of the box since it's a widely supported standard.
Your HDMI capture device (which is a cheap portable device with limited processing power) is probably going to do a much worse job.
Sending uncompressed video over usb is absurd.
No, they are not. The USB port is (usually) USB 2.0 and the video output, even though the application might claim 1080p 30 FPS, is a 'digital upscale'[1] from XGA or 720p. That in my view is decidedly not 'high quality'. My monitor has eight times that resolution and more than four times the framerate, totalling more than a 32× increase in bandwidth, and it is from 2021.
If users want high-quality video out from their pro cameras, use a capture card or monitor. That's how it's always been. As another commenter said, this article is rage-bait because the OP has purposely chosen a decidedly poorly-supported way to use their camera's functionality instead of the industry standard.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/canon/comments/1e32r51/canon_eos_we...
The Canon G5 X II has USB 3.1 over a USB-C port. All of what you said does not in any way shape or form apply to the topic at hand.
This entire comment section is a massive storm in a teacup by photography and AV amateurs who don't know the ins and outs of AV work flows and assume that stuff should just work the way they want it to.
Just because you didn't bother to do any amount of research whatsoever before going on your unhinged rants does not suddenly make them any more relevant when talking about this specific camera. We're not talking about generally ("loss of generality" ok Jan ), we're talking about a specific blog post from a specific person talking about a specific camera.
The fact that you still don't understand this shows you clearly are not responding in any type of good faith here. It's your way or the highway even if your way is wildly outdated and not relevant.
For example, my camera can't operate and charge over USB at the same time, so you need a supplemental power supply. And it won't autofocus continuously or keep the exposure and white balance stable unless you're recording a video. And videos can only be so long.
So I've got a HDMI-to-USB converter, a special HDMI cable, a special power brick and adaptor, a special tripod so all those cables don't pull the whole setup over, and I've got to restart video recording every 30 minutes or so, and wipe the microsd card regularly.
Your camera's probably better suited to this than mine :)
I believe you, but thats very silly.
Most mirrorless cameras a hybrids and you usually do not need this feature while takting stills.
I also just tried connecting it as a webcam over USB, and it does continuous autofocus when set up like that too. I'm sure it uses more power, but the camera can power itself over the USB port while connected, so thats not a problem.
My Sony that I've been using as a webcam since COVID can do that, and it was 6 years old when I bought it. Upgrade when you can!
> it won't autofocus continuously or keep the exposure and white balance stable unless you're recording a video
That basically defeats our setup as now they're worrying about their recording time running out in the middle of a meeting.
Even if you aren't buying Elgato, you can use Elgato's compatibility page to know which cameras work well: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/s/cam-link-camera-check
For those who don't know, the dummy battery is a power cable with a battery-shaped adapter that plugs in where the battery would go to provide continuous power.
I returned it and got an Elgato, which has worked great from day one.
This is how I've used my Sony camera since COVID. It works great.
I wasn't sure at first if OP was trying to do something nonstandard, because you get video to your computer with a video cable. Plus a way for your computer to capture that, which for me is CamLink.
Honestly, I'm surprised there's a relevant manufacturer app at all. Not surprised that it costs money.
This is a bit like not having power in your home to charge your camera with and asking the manufacturer for a generator. They may have a solution, but the price will be bad.
Drop the fee and that's now baked into the camera's base price.
Why should the OP need to pay a subscription to enable a feature that is build into the camera, that is a standard feature on other cameras and imposes no ongoing costs to the manufacturer¹? This is an example of gouging, pure and simple.
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[1] unless they are forcing the user to use their hosted service for steaming the webcam output, in which case there is some bandwidth and perhaps other processing cost, but that is on them for having not just implemented a standard that enables local-only recording
Getting video into your computer through USB is _not_ built into the camera. Else why is OP downloading an app to do it?
The app is part of the implementation, and it costs money. I have no problem with the manufacturer charging separately for that. The rest of us can use a video cable to get video into our computers.
> The app is part of the implementation
Give other cameras can do it, there has a standard for it since 2003, and there are F/OSS implementations for others, maybe I'm asking the wrong question and instead should have asked “why should the OP pay a subscription for their bad choice of how to implement the feature?”.
If I asked Sony for a power generator to charge my camera's battery, they could charge me a million a month if they'd like. Hopefully that would signal to me that there are better and more standard options.
They can. But that doesn't mean everyone is forced to be happy about it, and doesn't mean it can't be talked about so other people who might not be happy about it can use the information to chose a different camera from a different manufacturer instead of discovering the issue post-purchase.
> they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI
Or the industry standards for video-over-USB, that this manufacturer chose not to implement because they couldn't easily gouge a subscription out of it.
A standard way of doing that is to use a video cable to get video output and plug that into a capture card on your computer. OP doesn't want to do that and would prefer that the manufacturer included webcam functionality out of the box.
Also fair enough! But if that's the requirement, buy a camera that meets that requirement, and understand that it's not a standard feature in these cameras.
I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on. It's getting outraged over expecting a camera to do what it wasn't designed to do, when there are already simple and standard ways of making it do that.
No, it's because Canon didn't sell OP a webcam. There's no expectation for them to provide webcam software.
If someone wants an external camera that doubles as a webcam with no adapters, that's totally fine for them! They should shop with that in mind.
This is common for cameras. My Sony works in the same way. It can be used as a webcam using HDMI and a capture card. Canon clearly states this in their marketing for OP's camera.
OP apparently didn't understand this, but the solution is simple -- get an HDMI cable and a capture card.
And another standard way, supported by at least some cameras, without even single extra charge never mind a subscription⁰, is apparently video over USB.
> I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on.
No users are dying on this hill¹. OP is just stating, in an exasperated tone admittedly, what the state of affairs is with this camera. Some of us are agreeing with him that it seems off, and is part of the ongoing enshitification of the software and hardware worlds. Others can use this information to help guide their choice of camera (or supplier of other equipment), or not, their choice.
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[0] Which implies they could decide to discontinue the feature at a whim later, no matter how much the user has paid between now and then.
[1] I'll refrain² from mentioning that you are putting up quite a determined fight for the “nah, this sort of thing is fine, really” hill.
[2] Oops, I tell a lie…
Subscriptions make sense when you have ongoing costs like significant load on servers that are needed for the service provided. But not for some piece of software you write once and are more or less done with (minus some small patches)
But requiring a subscription is such a blatant “fuck you, we want more profit without doing any work, and you’re going to provide it.”
Edit: 4am math correction...
480Mbit/sec transfer; Uncompressed, that's ~333333 pixels per frame for 60FPS. Not even considering overhead, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class 1.1 support from 2005 includes Motion JPEG (low compression, all patents probably expired given it was developed in the 90s) and MPEG2 (also sufficiently old, to be unencumbered now).
However, if they'd use USB 3.0 ~ 5gbps, ideally over a USB-C port, the connection would be more modern, and easily able to handle even 4K video with now free from patents and well supported compression algorithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Connector_type_quick_refer...
USB ${N}Gbps instead of the confusing old labels and operation mode classifications.
I'll assume you meant the 5Gbps version of the link, which ( 5000000000/8/3/60 ) can drive about 3.47M (24 bit) pixels at 60fps, even raw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_display_resolut... It looks like 4K mode would require the use of VP8 (likely no hardware included) or h264. Patent license issues are soon to expire, (though some BS one won't until 2030, not sure how that's even possible), but no remedy for older models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Licensin... drat.
> Use the EOS Utility Webcam Beta Software (Mac and Windows) to turn your Canon camera into a high-quality webcam, or do the same using a clean HDMI output.
Canon advertising its potential to be used as a webcam doesn't mean it's a webcam. It means you can adapt it for use as one. And you still can. The adapter is an HDMI cable or software, which may or may not be free.
It's like me trying to sell you a car that can "turn into" a boat with the right attachments. Notice I didn't say how much the attachments cost.
Are there any USB-connectable capture devices that can process 4K?
Everything I see tries really hard to hide the fact that while they can input 4K, they can only produce 1920x1080.
(this dongle is also USB-A, unfortunately)
It's just a really poor reason to be outraged at Canon (or Sony or any of the other companies whose non-webcam cameras don't seamlessly turn into webcams without some standard A/V adapters).
Many of us have had the experience of clients telling us to "just" write code that they think is easy, but we know how that can go in reality.
There's already a simple solution here in HDMI. I don't see a reason to be outraged at Canon over not providing another solution that most buyers will never even use.
USB camera feeds work out of the box with Sony mirrorless cameras.
So ultimately, if Canon wants to play these games, let's see if the market of NEW buyers like me respond in a way that will make Canon change their minds.
Why does he even even record the videos himself? He can just hire actors to do what he wants, probably a lot better.
And what's the whole thing with buying a camera? He should just buy a studio and hire a crew to manage all that stuff.
The outrage in this thread is incredible. Buying a couple A/V adapters to adapt a non-webcam camera into a webcam is somehow seen as a terrible burden.
If someone doesn't want to do that, perhaps they should buy...a webcam. No adapters needed.
A camera comes with more power at the cost of simplicity for this use case.
A capture card and HDMI cable together cost less than $100. Hiring someone will be at least an order of magnitude more expensive—and more so the more people you hire.
That was the entire point of the comment, to point out the slippery slope in the HDMI/cable card argument in the first place.
There is an absolutely massive gulf between a one-time supplementary purchase of $100 versus a multi-million dollar studio, film crew, actors. The comment was ludicrous, sorry.
Guess what. OP isn't a broadcaster. Neither is the commenter. And everybody else here and their moms find it ludicrous that someone has to spend another X, where X is literally any amount over 0, to do something that the camera can already clearly do. In high quality. As evidenced by the existence of the software in the first place.
> The comment was ludicrous, sorry.
Yeah no shit Sherlock. That was the whole point. Are you actually this dense in real life or are you playing it up to be a troll?
This video has trended at the top of my home feed and all the good jokes and comments have been made.
All I can do is throw my upvotes in to the sea of tens of thousands.
Why not blame Apple for not providing drivers? It is pretty normal in Linux to check hardware compatibility. You mainly buy hardware with good software support.
Apple does not support this camera, so do not buy it!
It's like people love the horrible experience lol rather trauma than education type shit Leibniz was so beyond wrong about this smh
I have a few fuji cameras, and sadly their webcam software doesn't work for me, but for a cheap fix I bought a low-cost (~$10) HDMI USB capture card on AliExpress, and it works wonders.