SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible | Hacker News Reader

SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

smpte.org

293 pointszdw101 comments

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid.

It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal.

This will only increase innovation.

APIs have not been ruled uncopyrightable. The Supreme Court found that Google's use of the Java API's was fair use; fair use is specifically a defense against infringement of a copyrighted work.

There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.

But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.

You're right, fair use was the ruling. Thank you for the correction. In that case, would the implementation of a standard qualify? Feels like it would?

We need a SciHub for standards docs

LibGen?

Last time I checked (a few years ago), you had to pay some ridiculous price (230$ iirc) to view the SQL specification. SQL!

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

Once upon a time, acquiring a standard involved writing to a far away address and then waiting "six to eight weeks" for a paper document to show up in your mailbox. By 1995 (when internet access became common) SMPTE was seventy years old. Certain, uh, expectations had become concretized by then, and it took considerable time and effort to overcome those.

Construction codes are still pay walled.

NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...

IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024

And there are many others.

(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

> You have to build your projects to these specifications, or you will be held accountable! What specifications? Oh, you will have to pay to access them.

This is essentially a protection racket. Ludicrous.

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you think about who needs to have access to the correct and current building code or electric code or whatever for regular reference, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.

It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.

> especially with AI.

While AI models still hallucinate commonly, this might not be the best use of it.

The downsides of the occasional hallucinated answer for building standards seems like it could be pretty bad. Seems much worse than the upsides?

I think it's not just the answer you get, but using AI as a stochastic search engine over the rules to point you to potential answers.

This would potentially lead to a whole lot of injured people. There are already DIY jobs that are safe for homeowners to do. But some really should be done by a professional.

It's one thing to make the POP3 standard free; worst case your mail gets lost. It's another to make the standard for the electrical code free, so that people can incorrectly implement its quite complicated rules, and result in things like fires and electrocution.

This is a patently ridiculous take. People are still DIYing the very things you are concerned about, just not knowing whether what they did was up to code or not. Just look up DIY on YouTube and see.

Having access to the code won't change that. As laypeople it is too complex for them to understand. Often they simply ignore the code if they personally believe the code is unnecessary. It takes years of experience to understand why you should follow instructions you'd rather not. That's part of why the apprentice period is so long.

I have never seen a YouTube video where anyone even mentioned the code unless they were a professional or engineer. Most people are not very smart. Making the code free isn't going to make them smarter. I'm the one guy on subreddits telling people not to modify random beams in their house unless they know how it ties into the rest of the structure to determine the structural impact. 99% of people reply that I'm over-reacting. That's how they act towards the code. Slap it real hard and if it seems solid it's good to go.

> As laypeople it is too complex for them to understand. Often they simply ignore the code if they personally believe the code is unnecessary. It takes years of experience to understand why you should follow instructions you'd rather not.

Same is true about anything from cooking to crocheting to brushing teeth. Documentation isn't written for those who know, but for those want to know, and those who know better and would rather not follow it tend to not read it in the first place. It's as true of ISO standards as it is of instruction manual to your induction stove, or electric toothbrush.

> That's part of why the apprentice period is so long.

I'm going to bet that technically, post-COVID, it's "$300 + few hours of videos and a quiz" long.

(At least that seems to be the case for basic electrical work over here, in Poland, according to the electrician who did lights in my apartment the other day.)

> I have never seen a YouTube video where anyone even mentioned the code unless they were a professional or engineer.

Perhaps because they have no access to it without spending unreasonable amounts of money on it, unless they were a professional or engineer? YouTube videos are bargain bin education. A random video you referred to costed less to make than getting a bootleg copy of the code would. Probably whole channel did.

> Most people are not very smart. Making the code free isn't going to make them smarter.

Nothing will help "most people". But the rest would benefit.

BTW. most contractors are in the "not very smart" group too, which is a possible reason why you won't get many answers from them - they're either unable to, or plain unwilling to entertain people asking "why".

> I'm the one guy on subreddits telling people not to modify random beams in their house unless they know how it ties into the rest of the structure to determine the structural impact. 99% of people reply that I'm over-reacting. That's how they act towards the code. Slap it real hard and if it seems solid it's good to go.

It's a separate subject, but thing is, they're probably right.

In my experience, the difference between a load-bearing wall and a regular one boils down, for most people, to the question of whether they need a hammer drill or will regular cordless drill suffice. The hole is happening either way. I used to be the guy worrying about it a lot, until I noticed that even contractors don't care. Unless I'm literally asking them to cut a new entryway through the load-bearing part, they don't even parse the question.

Was I right to worry? Are they wrong? Well, I presume no to both, or else apartment building collapse would be daily news. Then again, I can't tell for sure, because of people in power thinking "it's too complex for [laypeople] to understand" and gate-keeping standards and codes.

  > > That's part of why the apprentice period is so long.
  > I'm going to bet that technically, post-COVID, it's "$300 + few hours of videos and a quiz" long.

Try 5 years.

  > BTW. most contractors are in the "not very smart" group too

And that's why there's a code, and inspections, and penalties. They know that if they mess it up they could be fined, sued, or have their license pulled. Even with all their training they can still mess up. Which is why just giving a homeowner the electrical code and saying "good luck" is even less likely to work out. Many contractors learn just enough to do one specific kind of job, and then just keep doing that job. But they do learn the right way to do that one job.

  > Was I right to worry? Are they wrong? Well, I presume no to both, or else apartment building collapse would be daily news

Buildings are usually engineered so that if a single structural member fails the whole thing doesn't come crashing down, because sometimes shit happens. That doesn't mean it's a great idea to weaken the structural integrity of your house.

When it comes to putting a hole in a beam or column, it depends on the member, and there are specific sizes the hole can be, locations, etc. Sometimes contractors don't go into the details and say "it'll be fine", because the way they do it is fine, because they learned the right way a long time ago and don't tell you that part. They might even be dumb enough to not realize that you would do it a different/less-safe way. But they'd probably do it the right way themselves, because that's how they learned it.

However, buildings do fail on a daily basis. They just aren't news, or aren't catastrophic / life-threatening. A lot of bad stuff happens on a daily basis and almost none of it makes it into the news.

And not a single thing you've said explains why the standards should be behind a paywall.

Not to mention, they also cannot spot when their contractors are blatantly cutting corners.

Because these bodies want to maintain a moat for the products made by member companies. No more, no less.

A great example of this is the GigE Vision/GenICam standards that are used by basically all machine vision cameras, which were accessible to non-licensees but not usefully implementable (these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards). So essentially all they could be used for were (1) as a licensee producing closed-source software for their own cameras, or (2) you as customer trying to complain to your camera/software vendor that they failed to implement some part of the standard correctly.

> these standards explicitly prohibited their use in implementing any open source implementation of the standards

Is that legally enforceable? IANAL, but that feels dubious to me. Feels like there should be a way around that.

If you make a thing and copyright it, you get to dictate terms. But the legal alternative would be a clean room implementation. The implementation team never saw the standard, so it's not being used.

Yeah, clean room implementation is the only way - and the route chosen by the aravis project that builds a FOSS implementation (which is a really great piece of software, way nicer to work with and easier to debug than the terrible vendor SDKs).

probably enforceable via patents.

This even extends to how some standards are written: deliberately complex and poor work just to make it frustrating and ensure a high barrier of entry. And of course there are either no test suites or testing against them costs a fortune.

This is the kind of thing politicians in a reasonable world would make illegal and subject to sanctions.

Because it costs a massive amount to get standards with this technical quality. They go through meetings, have a decent amount of staff to run, organize, have conference costs (locations...), take years to get done.

Someone has to pay for this. Making companies (and often, many of the individual members do this out of their own pocket) pay it all means worse standards, as some people stop going.

Sharing the cost to make the standard makes it a better mix of getting good standards and having low costs for final users.

I don’t know how SMPTE works, but ISO meeting participants are, famously, unpaid volunteers. Or perhaps I should rather say negatively paid, as it costs money to participate in (more than one) meeting.

Back in the day when I was doing this kind of thing, we had to buy a whole load of British Standards. They are £100s each, and they each cover a small part of work. If you’re designing steel structures you need one for basic structural design, one for loads on structures, one for steel structural design, one for the steel sections themselves, one for foundation design, one for execution of steel structures, and many many more. It’s thousands of pounds.

Sometimes standards bodies are formed by an oligarchy of industry players who have decided that their businesses would be simplified by mutual interoperability. They have no interest in lowering any bar of entry for other players though; certainly, they don't care about some hobbyist who balks at forking up $300 for a document.

To be fair, though, $300 is a pretty low bar. Certainly for any company, but even for a decent chunk of hobbyists who are really into building something.

Even a few thousand dollars isn't much of a barrier for a company that wants to build a product.

> To be fair, though, $300 is a pretty low bar.

What? You mean it's reasonable for a DIYer to cough up $300 just to find out what's the current standard for say, color coding wires on an AC outlet?

If you need multiple standards, it adds up quickly.

You have to fund the local national body tracking these and distribution and so on. Bigger thing back in the day of physical copies. Which involved real costs. Just imagine allowing anyone to order free paper... Only EU does that...

So then next question who should fund whole thing? Tax payers or the companies which is vast majority of users. Well self-funding organisation sounds really good for politicians. Move the costs to companies. Thus paid standards.

I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.

There was a time when buying the Ansi C standard cost over $200 but you could get Herb Schildt’s “Annotated Ansi C Standard” for $20, which some said reflected the value he added to the process.

Buying the ANSI C standard still costs about $300. Same for C++.

https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec98992024?sourc...

Nobody does it. gcc/clang implement it from the "drafts", which are published online due to the need to discuss them prior to standardization.

It used to be 18 dollars in the ANSI webstore for quite some time.

Also, you can look at smaller European countries putting their national cover page on it, and selling it cheaper. It’s the same standard, in English.

The C standard is only a bit cheaper at the Lithuanian agency: https://eshop.lsd.lt/public#!/product/info/0a640332-9273-166...

Sometimes it‘s much cheaper: the Germans sell IEC 62443-4-2 for 400 Euros, the Estonians for 40 Euros:

https://www.dinmedia.de/de/norm/csa-iec-62443-4-2/331021994?...

https://www.evs.ee/et/evs-en-iec-62443-4-2-2019

Strictly speaking it's the ISO C standard. ISO issues each new edition of the standard, and ANSI adopts it.

This was reversed for the first standard, which ANSI published in 1989; ISO adopted it, with editorial changes, in 1990. The term "ANSI C" usually (not entirely correctly) refers to the 1989 standard. If you want to refer to a particular version, it's best to refer to "ISO C" and the date (1990, 1999, 2011, 2023).

The money you pay for a copy of the standard doesn't go to the people who do the work of writing it, who are either volunteers or paid by their employers.

Somewhere along the line, especially with Internet in late 00s people understand the term Open to be the same as Free. When in reality they are not.

But now it is all too late to debate and fix this.

Well, for ISO it is a business model. And for a lot of standards which have limited interest in a certain industry and you are probably going to spend $2000 on gear to make measurements compatible with the standard it is not so bad to spend 133 CHF on something.

On the other hand I served on a committee and wrote a technical report that costs 133 CHF and personally I'm a bit annoyed that (1) I can't send you a link to read it for free and (2) a friend of mine who worked for the US government and is the only person I ever met who knew how to do complex modelling in OWL couldn't contribute her writing to it because everything US government employees write is supposed to be public domain.

People at NIST contribute to ISO standards.

If your entire goal is to create a standard... it seems like giving anyone access to the materials needed to _adhere_ to said standard is prerequisite.

Unless the goal is not to create standards, but instead to control access to said standard.

The people requiring adherence to a specific standard are not the people who then need to pay to see what they're supposed to be adhering to :(.

Strictly, just because the standard costs money doesn't mean that the information within it is otherwise unavailable. The C++ spec is an amusing example of this: the actual spec costs $$$, but the final draft is freely available. I can't imagine they sell many copies. I know that back when I was employed to work on a C++ compiler I only had access to the draft.

If demonstrating conformance is important, I suspect that the cost of access to specifications is only going to be a small fraction of the cost of certification. And as I understand things, it's certification that's the target of charging for specifications.

In the world they operated in when this started was in a big corporate environment, gatekeeping was a feature. Anyone who needed a standard could already get it for free through their companies records department.

At my first corporate job the first thing I did was checkout and read all the MPEG standards.

But I agree, the whale we need to go after is IEEE.

> the whale we need to go after is IEEE.

I wholeheartedly second this. I'm an individual member and a member of a specific IEEE society that sponsors a specific standard and I still have to pay for a copy. In contrast, the same standard has been adapted for specific industries and there are IEC, ITU and a SMPTE specs adopting it and those I can get for free. Doubly irritating because some of the most crucial standards like the 802 family are all paywalled. And it's not like it's warranted because if I need a standard I'm probably a vendor. Take high-speed Ethernet for example, there is such a proliferation of media types, lane counts, line encodings, FEC options and speed combinations that an engineer needs a reference from the source, and instead it's either third-party information or "stolen" PDFs.

The whole world benefits when our infrastructure can stay on spec and those specs are freely available for everyone. Specs are the vaccines holding civilization together.

A good chunk of 802 is not paywalled for individuals, notably at least 802.3 and 802.15.4, which I read good chunks of.

I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.

They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.

What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.

Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.

This is mostly true, with some exceptions. The Digital Cinema standards (428, 429, 430, etc.) were in fact developed in conference rooms and on whiteboards. It was a greenfield application with no incumbent formats.

I have written software which needed to support SMPTE standards, and to do so I pirated the standard. The standards are initially written to reflect existing systems, but then more systems are developed later.

Why didn't you get your company to pay for it?

I think you are mostly correct. However if we expand beyond SMPTE to ISO, the modern C++ standards process provides a counterexample.

I am not sure if this is what happens, but I could imagine an arrangement where you have a standard, and in order to advertise that you meet the standard, you are required to pay a fee to the standards body, and that fee is used to fund an audit to verify that you adhere to the standard.

It would be nice if, for example, USB did this so that I know a USB cable actually works with a specific standard before I buy it.

USB-IF does in fact do this and has for years. Certified devices are allowed to have a "Certified USB" logo somewhere on them, usually placed next to the regulatory compliance marks.

Both can be true. Promoting a standard isn’t free, and having licensing and certification fees, especially in an industry where such practices make a standardization org get taken more seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!

IP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.

It’s a proprietary standard moving to an open standard

As someone working in standardization: I don't know any standardization organization where the people doing the actual work of writing standards are paid for their work. I certainly am not.

In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".

Is "overhead" a euphemism for administrator salaries?

Partially. Yes. Look at the budgets of these orgs and you'll see what I mean.

I use the term similar to who it's used for non-profit. The orgs I'm involved with are almost exclusively not involved in the actual standards creation.

If the secretariats were to shut down tomorrow I'd say the actual work on the standards could continue without anyone noticing.

There is a reason that at least the EU is considering modernizing the system. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/consultations/pub...

ISO, CEN, CENELEC, ETSI are stuck very much in the past.

So yes. Overhead.

No. In such organizations the money goes towards all of the usual things such as tax, building rental, utilities, and licences, as well as employee salaries and social security contributions.

BSI Group, for example, paid 26.1% tax (25% corporation tax plus some other stuff) according to its 2025 financial statement.

In my direct experience, the people who write the standard texts get a room to sit in, power for laptops, a whiteboard, and tea/coffee and biscuits, a few days per year.

It costs money to operate a website, too.

In France if a standard is mandated by law (like electrical home wiring) then it must be freely available.

I assume most democracies have similar laws, it's a basic right to know what laws you should follow ...

Does that actually mean "freely" (as in beer) available, or it must be able for anyone to be procurred?

I would assume that France, like many countries heavily rely on ISO standards, which in many cases cost some money. Or is it the case that those standards are not explicitly mandated, but are essentially only fulfillable by knowing the ISO standard?

In French

https://www.francenormalisation.fr/les-acteurs-de-la-normali...

If there is only knowing the norm that makes you able to follow the law that refers it then it's a "obligatory norm" and must be readable without cost.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI00004...

List of such norms in spreadhseet linked here:

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/autour-de-la-loi...

When the EU legislates compliance with a standard into law, they pay the standards body for a license covering all EU residents and citizens

Giving a nice incentive for a standards body to lobby EU politicians to write their standard(s) into law proposals.

Success? Ca€€hing! (sound of cash register)

In the Netherlands it doesn’t quite work like that in reality. There’s a whole bunch of laws that refer to norms indirectly. In theory you could meet requirements without them but in practice it is absolutely impossible.

Interesting, could you cite one such law and norm?

Are you sure France is a democracy and not a republic?

Remember buying the 430.10 standard pdf back in the days in order to build subreader.io's cinema integration. Nice that it is openly available now!

From [1],

>This move is part of a broader effort to modernize the organization's Standards development and publication processes. Recent initiatives include:

>Adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control

>Issue tracking and automation

>Transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring

>Implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release.

I am not entirely sure the Hosting on Github, Issue tracking and automation, and HTML-based authoring are all good thing. Although I would guess it is still better than what they had.

And on another note, can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free? SMPTE doesn't hold any patents. And I don't believe their original standards were hard to access. Are there any significant impact of this announcement?

[1] https://www.smpte.org/setting-the-standards-free?hsCtaTracki...

>can anyone pin point the significance of making this entirely Free?

It's critical for data encodings (codecs, metadata,) because without free standards developers will attempt to reverse engineer from sample files, resulting in poor interoperability and causing chaos for those implementers that actually do bother to acquire and read the spec.

GitHub == git, which is free. You can clone the repo and push it to wherever. No comment on the rest. I am just pointing out that using GitHub for source code doesn't mean mean that code can't be easily forked or used elsewhere. I suspect GitHub is for convenience since the majority of folks using git use it.

The git part of github is a very small part of it, they are using Github issues etc which are not exportable/cross-platform.

So yes, you can git clone the repo and get the HTML, but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.

> but if you want all the other stuff (the "github based workflows") then you have to use github.

Except what would you want it for? The issues and wikis and "github based workflows" are for people working on a thing, not for people using that thing or depending on it.

People that write standards and work on committees that write standards are working on a thing.

SMPTE have chosen github because it has the other stuff to allow them to manage the committee work, handle the issues raised in committees, drafts, tagging different versions, dealing with the committee processes etc.

They could have chosen something like JIRA, so at least we've avoided that.

That's what they said in the post about it being open.

They've moved the internal email mailing lists and other workflow to github as well as using git for the version control of the source.

Right. But people that write standards and work on committees that write standards are going to use whatever it is that the coordinating org wants, or whatever they can agree on, and they by definition will have access to it. For everyone else, none of that is of any relevance (at least beyond the ability to listen in on the process as it happens).

Full pile of standards available here:

https://pub.smpte.org/doc/

There's some really neat ones all the way from film standards to digital cinema

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

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

And this should be mandatory.

Opened up my older clothes dryer to replace the belt. Has a two-pager schematic inside. Reminded me we used to have a TV that came with similar details.

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

What the heck is SMPTE?

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

The SMPTE standards have been very important for cinematography and television, especially for professional applications.

Their importance has decreased since the transition to digital video, when many relevant standards have been issued by other organizations, but many SMPTE standards are still important, especially regarding the formats used for distributing digital movies for movie theaters.

I learned this from the Frank Zappa song "Baby Snakes" which contains the lyrics:

They live in a ho-ho-hole

(Tiny hole)

That is usually empty

(Usually empty, tiny too)

They live by a code

(Dit dit dit dit)

That is usually SMPTE

Which stands for

Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers

But they are getting back in the game with SMPTE 2110 which is a standard that describes how to send digital media over an IP network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Motion_Picture_and_...

Didn't realize they were so broad in scope. The only thing I had heard of was "SMPTE codes" used in audio recording to sync up multiple multi-track recording machines, so that e.g. you could record 30 tracks using two 16-track recorders (with one track on each machine used for the sync). I never bothered to look up what SMPTE meant.

You’re likely referring to SMPTE timecode, a method of conveying timing information about a video signal (eg. HH:MM:SS:FF), which is SMPTE 12M. There are various ways that timecode is conveyed in media such as LTC (linear timecode, usually carried as an audio signal), VITC (vertical interval timecode, in the vertical blanking interval of a video signal), and others.

I had the same question. I clicked on their menu About > Who is SMPTE page and it didn't define the acronym either.

Then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and I did see it in the footer: SOCIETY OF MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION ENGINEERS

Today I learned

I thought it was the Transatlantic album (StoltMorsePortnoyTrewavas)

I saw it and thought it was an extension to the the SMTP standard.

Explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk9xpH5aUtk

Also the name of prog supergroup Transatlantic's first album, SMPT:E, a play on the band members names.

Great, now do AES and IEEE.

At least AES membership gets you free access to all of their standards, which is more than can be said for IEEE.

Source: I'm a card-carrying AES member.

And pretty cheap. I was a member for a year, just to get access to the entire AES67 standard. I think it was $65 for the membership at the time.

Indeed, I only learned this recently. There was a time when AES digital library access required an extra fee.

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