Linux goes to Hollywood

j2brown writes: " Yahoo! News has this little article about IBM taking Linux to Hollywood. " It's not a very in-depth article, but it is interesting that Big Blue is saying that Hollywood will be moving their rendering stuffs to Linux in the next 12 to 18 months. Wonder how SGI feels about that.

Big deal

[Animats]

Of course you want to run a free OS on a render farm. The OS doesn't do much on a render farm. You have one app in there, crunching away. It needs network and file access. That's it. Just about any OS will work. So people use the cheapest one. That's to be expected.

Render farms are great, content-creation is better

[tyrann98]

Render farms just crunch numbers and that is where Linux is succeeding. Linux on x86 (AMD or Intel) is displacing SGI not based on qualities of the Linux OS necessarily, but due to the low cost of x86 hardware, high quality compilers and free OS last. I'm sure NetBSD would be just as good is this application. Linux could even be replaced by commercial render-farm operations that run on purpose-built hardware.

SGI effectively gives away their OS and you have to pay incredible prices for their hardware. For certain applications where real-time 3D performance or high-bandwidth memory applications is required, SGI and Sun still has the tools to beat the x86 platform any day. Real workstations still have many advantages over the best PC motherboards. But all of additional cost for SGI hardware is a waste if you are just number crunching.

However, the news that IBM and Alias are developing content-creation software for Linux is a very good sign. These are the tools that every artist would be using to push pixels, and that's the way to get a huge foothold in the Hollywood. That moves Linux for the room in the back to the desktop of each artist.

Re:IBM is a bit late.

[room101]

That is because IBM doesn't do anything until it has a solid business case. They didn't get involved in Linux until it becase viable for business and there was a proven track record.

IBM doesn't do anything "half-assed". They try very hard not to waste their money, and sometimes that means that they wait until others have blazed the trail before they follow it.

What this might mean...

[Eslyjah]

Hopefully, Hollywood will be willing to put some time and money into developing Linux. In the longer term, this would mean that we, the "regular users" of Linux would benefit from better graphics capabilities of the OS as a whole. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but you never know...

IBM isn't the only one...

[willy_me]

Apple will also be pushing into this realm very soon - they've already, with 1394 and iMovie, have pushed themselves into the home consumer market. Once OSX matures, they should finally have a great OS to market. Combine this with the fact that the 64bit G5 is due out early next year and that Steve Jobs runs both Apple and Pixar...... See the potential?

The real problem is of course that Apple doesn't have any hardware that's up to the challenge. They need some good rack-mount servers similar to those that IBM sell. Rumors [thinksecret.com] of these servers exist and should they be true, Apple will finally have what it needs to become a player in this industry.

There are still lots of "if"s but regardless, I'd like to see SGI, IBM, and Apple all fighing for this market. It should produce some great products...

Willy

Re:SGI says this...

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, the OS is not a bottle neck, the hardware is.

Yep, that's why the move to Linux is smart for a lot of these companies. They can get a bunch of dirt cheap intel boxes and throw linux on them, instead of purchasing a less than cheap SGI box. True, the SGI box is real hardware and will perform better, but now that Intel boxes are so cheap and the performance difference isn't that great, Linux on cheap hardware makes sense.

Re:They are different people

[Nater]

legal ones

Licensed ones, you mean. Unlicensed players that were written for the purpose of interoperability with the format and by way of reverse engineering are just as legal as the licensed players. Calling the licensed players "legal players" implies otherwise.

Other than that one nit, I agree completely, the market for licensed players on Linux no longer exists.

Re:DVD support

[TheAwfulTruth]

This "cure" is FAR worse than the disease. :( When this kind of attitude takes over we will then truly be in tech. hell.

SGI says this...

[kirkb]

IRIX is the most scalable, feature-rich, high-performance OS available. For high-end scalability, big I/O performance, real-time performance, and superior graphics capabilities, IRIX is the premier choice. No OS, including Windows® 2000, Linux®, or Solaris®, is capable of matching IRIX in these respects.

(from http://www.sgi.com/developers/feature/2001/roadmap .html)

Re:And this is good?

[connorbd]

You have an interesting point, but you know, I think Theo De Raadt said it best regarding the licensing of OpenBSD: if you want to use it in a baby mulcher, we can't stop you anyway. Linux is not an organization; it's an operating system. The organizations involved with it are entitled to make money (if they can; they shouldn't be running to the government for help), and they're as free to do with it as they please as we are.

The fact is that you can't say, "No, you can't use it for that" when you're dealing with a GPL product. Moreover, Linux is being used in the industry by techies, many of whom probably roughly the same attitude we do towards industry lawyers. We (who is this we, kemo sabe?) can object all we want, but the truth is that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, and, like it or not, that's probably the way it should be.

And all the handwringing in the world won't change that.

/Brian

They are different people

[donutello]

Firstly, "Hollywood", or rather the movie copyright holders are not against allowing users to watch DVDs on Linux. They are against the DVD protection being cracked. They are also against free players where they don't make any money out of the deal. They have created the format and expect to make money off any players. There are mainstream efforts to create Linux DVD players by companies who have licensed the format. Secondly, the people who hold the copyrights to those movies are NOT the same people that create the special effects. People get hired to do the special effects for films, which they do either for a flat fee or a cut of the profits or some combination thereof. They don't make any decisions about distributing the movie and leave that up to the distributors. Of course you could have learned all this if you had simply taking Thinking 101.

'Yer basic hypocracy??!

[_Mustang]

``The idea that Linux is open source is very attractive to people in Hollywood, because they're so technically astute,'' said SGI's Greg Estes.

Is this guy sucking up or what? Astute? HTF can they be *so technically astute* when they can't grasp the simple concept that Linux users just want to be able to access their own PAID FOR media??
But wait - it gets even better..

``I've been told by senior executives at virtually every one of the major studios that this transformation will happen,'' IBM's Canepa said. ``They will retool their content creation onto an open platform, and they will adopt Linux.''

Retool onto an open platform? Hmm, sounds like just a lot of BS to me. On the other hand, maybe this is the turning point where those sob's at the RIAA/MPAA/whatever come to realize that Linux is no different from Windows in that it's a tool for an end. And in the case of Linux, the tool belongs to EVERYONE not just those willing to bend over for MS.. Maybe there is some promise here after all...Once Linux is in use by techs AND the content people, how much longer could it be before it's the corporate platform waving Windows out the door? At that point it's doubtfull that any Exec could deny the need for fully supporting Linux users.