Since the video format wars of the mid 2000's, Blu-ray has reigned supreme for physical high-definition video media. One problem with the high-density, high-definition optical disc format is that it's also proprietary. Several layers of access-control are built onto those disks, making them (relatively) expensive to produce, but also much harder to make copies for backups and sharing.

Preventing sharing is exactly the point for a lot of the big name companies that make up the Blu-ray Association. Their goal is exactly the opposite of what free-culture buffs like Terry Hancock want for their artistic endeavors. In fact, that's why Hancock's running a Kickstarter to fund his next project: writing an open-source, completely free format to put HD video on SDHC cards.

Hancock is a contributor to Free Software Magazine and has worked as a research assistant on the McDonald Observatory planet search program. While he's always been a free-culture advocate, his recent Kickstarter is pushing him more into the roll of activist. He’s an avid science fiction buff (“I love the first 45 minutes of Alien," he wrote to Ars. "Not that I didn't like the rest of the film—it's a fine horror film—but it was the science-fiction that blew me away.”). His latest project—an animated sci-fi video called Lunatics—is what spurred this particular project, which he calls “Lib-Ray”.

Hancock asserts that Lib-Ray won't require too much complex code. He plans on creating a simple wizard for authoring high-definition videos (which can be made complete with HTML5-based menus and subtitle functionality) on SD cards, writing a player for the Flash media, and authoring documentation so that anyone can improve or customize his design.

Lib-ray will use the common MKV video container format with VP8 video at 30 frames per second in 1080p. Hancock says he’ll eventually extend this to 60 fps, 3D, and then 4K video quality (if you donate over $100, he says he’ll give you an experimental "Lib-Ray 4K" release of a 15 minute short called Sintel by the Blender Foundation). He’ll use Webkit libraries to build out the menus then, voila!, a completely free way to put high-definition files on physical media.

That "physical media" part has some disparaging Lib-ray as pointless, though. "It seems silly to introduce a new physical media format in this day and age. Physical formats rely on wide acceptance, and a DRM-free open format based on expensive SD cards isn't going to attract any serious content producers," Reddit user "adrij" suggested.

But Hancock told Ars that he’s got no illusions of starting revolutions with his project. Lib-ray isn’t about taking the industry by storm, it’s about creating options for niche communities that already know they’ll probably never make it big. Necessity is the mother of Lib-Ray in this case: Hancock wanted to release a high-definition version of his Lunatics project, but was unsatisfied with the idea of giving backers a code to download copies of the movie. "I don't like the idea of selling an inferior copy of my film on DVD to people in a Kickstarter and then having the really high-quality version available only as a free download. That just seems backwards to me. The collector's edition offline version I sell to somebody should be the very best experience I can put in a box."

Essentially, Lib-ray is meant to cater to an entirely different business model than Blu-ray presupposes: one in which the movie is likely already paid for (by, say, a Kickstarter), and the movie is the gift to donors rather than the commodity to be sold. This is a situation for local and fringe artists who admit they won’t please everyone, but they’ll please a small audience a lot. These artists expect "shorter runs and higher prices per unit," Hancock wrote to Ars. "That works against the mass-pressing mentality of the Blu-Ray and DVD production process, where you have to print a 1000 disks to break even. With Lib-Ray, though, you can print 10 or even 1 if you like. It's more expensive per unit, but it scales well down to short runs...And of course, it's not just about the money, it's also about the DRM, the message that sends to your fans, and the fact that you're fueling an industry which is no friend to free-culture or independent film producers."

So what about the $19,000 he’s trying to raise? It may seem a little pricey, considering the file formats exist online already, and he’s simply adding HTML5 menus to an MKV video container and writing that to an SDHC card. But Hancock says that’s how much it will cost for him to put aside other projects and see Lib-ray come to fruition. "I had originally intended to avoid doing any actual programming on Lib-Ray, because I'm not a pro, and I'm sure there are people who could do a better, or at least faster job of it. Instead, I would just focus on the data standard, and hope that having content in the format would encourage someone to want to work on getting it to play properly," Hancock told Ars. "But after a year of publishing articles about the idea and presenting to people, I didn't get any nibbles from developers interested in going the few extra steps to make it work smoothly... So I thought, 'How hard can it be?

"It seems like it ought to be really hard, because Blu-Ray was expensive to develop. But when you look closely, you realize that all of the money went to pay for the DRM. The actual task of making a video standard that supports high-definition playback and a menu system is just not that complicated. There are open standards, so it's just a matter of picking the ones you want to use and making sure you have a player that can handle those choices." And as they say, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.