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I'm not sure about DSL, but this is the same Thomson that owns RCA, GE, and the U.S. rights to the MP3 patents. Boycott Thomson's new "Stupid Card" project and support the Ogg codec projects instead.

The patent is fairly specific in regards to the actual recording process - in that the input stream is encoded to mpeg-1 - I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt VCRs used mpeg-1

You seem correct about the MPEG requirement; Apple, Microsoft, and Real could circumvent the patent by using their proprietary video encodings. From the patent:

providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;

This covers not only MPEG-1 but also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (aka DivX ;-) )standards; infringing this patent requires infringing the patents on MPEG. To infringe a patent, you have to infringe one claim, but to infringe a claim, you must infringe every part of that claim. As all other claims refer back to claim 1 (and the nearly identical claim 32), a fellow could circumvent this patent by using a compression technology other than one created by MPEG, such as the Ogg Tarkin video compression technology that Xiph.org is developing.

And as diakka said, two tuner cards in one box (or even in one household) could by a reasonable stretch of the imagination be considered infringement.

You're referring to the "doctrine of equivalents," which was recently severely narrowed. The patent explicitly names MPEG, and it does not say "or any other media encoding technology."

Through its Internet connection, the device's internal software can be upgraded to add new features, support next-generation audio formats, change its operation, fix bugs, etc.

How about current generation audio formats? Ogg Vorbis!

http://www.xiph.org/archives/tarkin-dev/index.html

In other words, stuff that Linux has been doing for well on 3 years already. RipperX will let you not only play and rip at the same time, but it will rip the next song off the drive while encoding the current song -- this used to save me a bunch of time when I ran it on my P166; not so much on my Athlon 1ghz, though. It uses cdparanoia to do the scratch repair and such.

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

All the more reason to agressively push for the adoption and penetration of Ogg Vorbis.

By know, everyone in the know should have checked out the Xiphophorus company homepage, and taken a look at Ogg and Vorbis.

If we can create a Napster-like groundswell for an open audio codec such as Vorbis, then it will not matter if Windows XP ships with only Windows Media Audio and the Windows Media Player. The fact is, while WMA is good, it isn't open or free, and and the Windows player isn't as strong as WinAmp or XMMS.

Free is good. That is why Napster did so well. If the downloadable audio market is saturated by ".ogg" files and flooded with high quality and free audio players, then Ogg Vorbis has a chance of beating those nasty little ".wma"'s.

All the more reason to agressively push for the adoption and penetration of Ogg Vorbis.

By know, everyone in the know should have checked out the Xiphophorus company homepage, and taken a look at Ogg and Vorbis.

If we can create a Napster-like groundswell for an open audio codec such as Vorbis, then it will not matter if Windows XP ships with only Windows Media Audio and the Windows Media Player. The fact is, while WMA is good, it isn't open or free, and and the Windows player isn't as strong as WinAmp or XMMS.

Free is good. That is why Napster did so well. If the downloadable audio market is saturated by ".ogg" files and flooded with high quality and free audio players, then Ogg Vorbis has a chance of beating those nasty little ".wma"'s.

All the more reason to agressively push for the adoption and penetration of Ogg Vorbis.

By know, everyone in the know should have checked out the Xiphophorus company homepage, and taken a look at Ogg and Vorbis.

If we can create a Napster-like groundswell for an open audio codec such as Vorbis, then it will not matter if Windows XP ships with only Windows Media Audio and the Windows Media Player. The fact is, while WMA is good, it isn't open or free, and and the Windows player isn't as strong as WinAmp or XMMS.

Free is good. That is why Napster did so well. If the downloadable audio market is saturated by ".ogg" files and flooded with high quality and free audio players, then Ogg Vorbis has a chance of beating those nasty little ".wma"'s.

No Ogg Vorbis support?

I have high hopes for Ogg Vorbis.

We /. types like it because it's free. Big Business will like it because they will never have to pay anything to use it. The only people who won't like it will be the ones who want to lock up the music, but in the long run they are doomed to fail.

(Given a choice between paying for music in WMF format and paying for music in a CD format, I will buy the CD every time. I predict that enough other people will do the same to ensure that WMF never takes over the world.)

steveha

Hm. I wonder whether tools like cdparanoia could defeat this scheme. I know cdparanoia will reread any areas it gets errors on repeatedly, with the intent to eventually get the correct data, despite scratches, etc. I'm not sure what happens if even after multiple attempts, no data can be retrieved.

In any case, I can't see it being difficult to hack a version of cdparanoia that will only attempt a read X times, then give up and move on, allowing easy ripping of the cds.

What I was getting at is that they weren't. See "I can play audio CDs perfectly; why is reading the CD into a file so difficult and prone to errors? It's just the same thing." in the cdparanoia faq.
--

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/index.html

Here's a link to a page with some info (not much) on the Ogg Tarking video codec. You can view the mailing list archives. From the looks of it, they are going to be using a codec based on wavelets. Support this, not DivX. DivX is good for now, but in the long run we need something free and open, and I don't think DivX qualifies.

we need to let content providers know that there are platforms that dont use propriatary codecs.

i know /. readers already know all this, but it needs saying again. maybe a journalist or someone else making a movie will read this comment.

thankfully we have the xiph project.

The 'Thor-and-the-Snake' logo is drawn somewhat from Norse mythology; the real symbolism is the sine-curve shape of the snake. Thor is hefting Mjollnir about to compress the periodic signal Jörmungandr... See, it all makes sense.

Why do you consider programming to be something other than art? Sure, a non-programmer may not be able to appreciate the code in raw form, but even a layman can appreciate an intuitive, well-written interface or an efficient-running program.

No matter what field you're in, be it Programming, Painting, Architecture or Demolitions, there is beauty and art to be found. If you ever get a chance to watch a demolitions crew topple a tall building, go see it. Watching a skyscraper coming down is a sight to behold. The fact that the moment is gone when the dust clears doesn't change the fact that it's art.

If you are one that likes to burrow into code, make sure to check out the code for Ogg Vorbis. I don't understand most of the math behind the encoding algorithm, but the structure is beautiful and easy to understand. This code was definitely written by artists. The code for the Apache Foundation's Xerxes XML is another project that I would consider to be great art.

Those who judge programming and art by seperate measures need to go back and read their Zen. It may all come down to differences in the definition of 'art', but I'll always shake my head when someone claims there's something that falls outside the scope of what can be considered art.


Seth

Funny, I thought web servers acted this way

And they're on high-speed T3 or OCx connections to the Internet, connections that are designed to handle such a load.

If you find the reply your looking for, then there is no need to query the remaining peers

What if your query isn't an exact match to one file? For instance, I'm looking for "songs by The Offspring, in .ogg or .mp3 format, at bitrate >= 160 kilobit/s," in whatever query language the system uses. (I picked a random P2P-friendly band.) I'm not "Feeling Lucky"; I know my query is vague, but I want to survey the net around me and see what Offspring tracks are on hosts close to mine. The reply is the set of results I get back, not just the chronologically first element.

If, on the other hand, I typed in "artist contains Offspring, title contains Pretty Fly, length within +/- 3 s of [whatever the real length is], Ogg Vorbis format, bitrate 160-192 kbps, on a persistent connection," I would accept a "first reply" response.

No, each of these 'victims' would only receive a single 60 byte packet

From every single user who's searching. Say a user searches a 20,000 user network once every 10 minutes (this takes into account inactive users). You'll have to handle (on the average) 2,000 queries a minute, over 60 a second. That's not even counting peak use. Can your hardware and network connection keep up?

But whenever I think of the obvious solution to this problem (proxies that cache search requests for a group of users), I realize that such a topology would be equivalent to that of the existing OpenNap network.

I'll admit up front that I haven't read the article - the comments already posted about it tell me that it's probably a waste of time. The theme, apparently, is that "geeks" are preventing the internet from being a spiffy, flashy experience. Obviously, that's ignorant foolishness. Not only would getting geeks out of the 'net not make it prettier, it would prevent the continued development of the "Rich Experience®" that the marketroids are pushing...:

• MNG for animated graphics
  
• PNG for still images
• Ogg Vorbis for sound and music
• Icecast for "Internet Radio"
• PHP for dynamic web page generation
• (Not to mention PERL for the same sort of thing!)
• The Infrastructure to deliver all this stuff affordably in the first place (too many links to post! OS's, servers, etc...)

And I'm certain there are plenty more examples people could add to this list...

The lawsuit!?!? What lawsuit?!?! We haven't been sued by anyone, let alone Fraunhofer or Thomson. The only thing that's happened so far (aside from minor industry FUD) is that a Thomson VP shot his mouth off on something about which he wasn't well informed, and a spokesman later backed off on the statement.

No one has sued anybody! Geez, the rumors Slashdot can start!

Monty
http://www.xiph.org/

What concerns me even more than this is as I understand it, the DTV that the FCC has mandated that we migrate to will be, by law, encoded in pay-to-license formats. (Dolby Digital and MPEG.) Currently, NTSC television is (to my knowledge) license free. This means all sorts of nasty private corporate interests between people who want to make stuff and the Evil Companies. ("No, it won't run Ogg or on Linux.")

Great, but what does this mean for projects like L.A.M.E., which has just recently freed itself from Fraunhofer ["regular"] mp3 code/patents? Back into the fray?"

Why Vorbis? MP3 is open.

No, it isn't. Fraunhofer (and other MPEG consortium members) claim that it is impossible to create an mp3 encoder without infringing on their patents. To create/use an encoder, the law says one must pay royalties to Fraunhofer and other MPEG Consortium members. In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante.

So FhG/Thomson have released a new codec, based on mp3, which they claim gives twice the compression (but probably only does about 1.5x). The guys behind LAME think that if they were to make some changes that weren't allowed by the original spec (just like FhG have done), then within 120 hours of coding they could make big improvements, probably up to the 1.5 mark. What stops them is that existing players wouldn't play it

It is impossible for a 64kbps mp3pro stream to sound like 64kbps to an old player and 128kbps to a new one in the manner they've described. If they ofload large amounts of processing onto the player, the having a 64kbps stream sound like 48kbps on a mp3 player and 128kbps on mp3pro then that I can just about accept

So, why would we want to move from mp3 to mp3pro? The quality improvement isn't that great - vorbis will be able to match that by about release 2, and vorbis is patent free GPL / LGPL and will soon support subtitles and video! mp3pro will be at least as patented and needing licencing as mp3 (don't forgot that lots of companies are now being asked for mp3 royalties from FhG, who haven't gone after royalties for a few years), and quite possibly more. So, when you're in that boat you've also got to consider real audio and media player as serious contenders (they're cheaper than mp3pro is likely to be based on mp3, and sound nearly as good), while Vorbis shines out.

Finally we've got the player issue. You can get an mp3 player for almost every platform out there. Realplayer and media player run on very few, and look at dvds! Are we really gonna see players for linux, bsd, os2, beos?

Yeah, we're going to see some mp3pro, but I don't think it'll oust mp3 just like that, and I really think vorbis is the one to watch. (Vorbis is at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/)

Xiphophorus

and

Fiasco!

Or maybe they have a patent on "A method of compressing audio to preserve quality but reduce space usage.

Well according to this patent, obtained by Thompson for his "invention", that may be exactly what they claim. The patent would seem to cover any audio compression method that converts from time domain to frequency domain, does quantization, then entropy coding.

The other Fraunhofer patent is at least a bit more focused, and specifies a breakdown into frequency groups, followed by quantization, then compression. The Ogg Vorbis scheme avoids the first stage of prefiltering into smaller frequency bands, and does the transform in one feel swoop. This requires more work for the transform, but arguably gives better results.

In short, the first patent I mentioned seems difficult to defend against, unless it can be shown to be overly broad or invalid. The second is exactly what Ogg Vorbis was avoiding.

The ripper is called cdparanoia, available at xiph.org

-----

What if you re-encode it in a superior format, with links to the appropriate plugins and decoders, and help spread the defeat of a patent encumbered, technically inferior system of transferring audio recordings.

Oh, and I didn't see anything in their TOS about .ogg files, did you ;^)

Fist Prost

"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."

Just use Vorbis :-). This works just as far as it doesn't get too popular..

By posting MP3:s on Half-Price, you are violating their rules.

Very well, then post Ogg Vorbis files instead.

--Bud

I don't know, to me asking for Linux to be a Windows software platform is like asking for a VTOL jet with four-wheel drive....

On the other hand, I suspect that deep down it isn't "Windows Applications", specifically, that you 'need' and want, but rather applications that do the same thing at least as well, and in a similar manner to and compatible with the Windows versions (especially, to be blunt ,games and easier-to-set-up hardware accelerated 3D, and more support for the media formats (e.g. 'WMF') that Microsoft is force-feeding everyone through their present control of the market [in my opinion]). This I can certainly agree with.

Widely available good replacements for proprietary formats will hopefully become more common. I can't afford 'flash' authoring utilities (and I don't think they're available for Linux anyway), but would love to see some progress with the '.mng over .ogg' concept that someone mentioned some time back, for example.

.ogg files are Ogg Vorbis audio files. Ogg Vorbis is conceptually similar to mp3, in that it compresses audio data by discarding "inaudible" material, but is a different algorithm, and thus not covered by the mp3 patents. It is open-source, also. OV's designers claim that it should scale to low bitrates better than mp3, and should provide at least equal, possibly better, sound quality at similar bit rates. I listen to both mp3 and OV using WinAmp (there is a decoder plug-in for WinAmp at the OV site, and one for XMMS also for Linux users), and I don't really hear a significant difference, but I like the patent-free, open-source nature of OV, so I think I will be using it instead of mp3 for my own CD ripping.

We mentioned the Fraunhofer license fees and he apparently told the owner of this site who didn't know and just about wet his pants.

Personally I've switched to OGG Vorbis now that it is supported in XMMS and in WinAmp. Good to see that streaming in Ogg is now working, and IceCast supports that too.

Release your material in MP3 and other open formats.

I think our friends @ Fraunhofer might have something to say about just how FREE (gratis & libre) our MP3s are. Lets remember our friends at Ogg Vorbis and what is really free.

**"and other" implies that MP3 *is* open. So spare yourself the poor argument that I misunderstood them.

I'd use a 2Ghz processor for emulation, encoding my CDs to ogg files and compiling software quickly. There's always a use for a speedy processor - but I wouldn't throw a lot of money at one just yet.

I don't know why, but this depresses me more than anything I've seen recently on the subject.

• Copy-protected VHS tapes didn't seem to matter. You could still copy them, but copying them left a tell-tale tag. Of course, it was only illegal to make illegal copies and then rent them out for money, so no harm done. Fair use is preserved, and people trying to make a quick buck off of the work of others get what they deserve.
• Copy protection on DAT recorders really sucked, but it still didn't seem all that bad. Maybe that was just because I wasn't a musician or musical artist.
• SDMI really rankled me, but hey, it doesn't stop me from recording my *own* MP3s. And now that things like Ogg Vorbis are coming out, this is really irrelevant.
• Encyrpted DVDs aren't great, but somehow I don't mind that as much. You paid for it, you play it, you can't copy it. I really don't like it, but somehow it seems like something we could overcome.
• The DMCA really really sucks, but that one seems destined to be destroyed in the Supreme Court. I'm pretty confident.
• But when the federal government starts mandating total copy protection of media broadcast on the open spectrum, the property of the people, I feel much more betrayed than I did before. The Executive branch, much harder to control than the legislative, is taking away an entire chunk of property that used to belong to the people as a whole, and giving it wholesale to a small handful of very large companies.

Interestingly, reminding myself that I don't watch TV doesn't seem to help. The FCC is overstepping its bounds, here, and I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it.

Compression ratios like that make me very happy. Any guesses to what ogg video will look like? I'm anxiously awaiting ogg vorbis (audio format) myself. I hope this project catches on, because I would like to see a suite of fully-opena and free multimedia formats. Vorbis promises to be very flexible, and it would be nice if we could get the same kind of compression in MPEG-4 into a free package, and this looks like it could be the outlet for it, with the right modifications.

Finally one of the panel stood up and said. I'm sorry, MP3s are here you're too late. There is hardware available, consumers like it and it has already been adopted as the defacto standard. You have no place to decide whether it gets adopted or not.

I stood up and clapped.

[ogg vorbis for digital audio]

With all of the recent legal difficulties relating to multimedia coming to the forefront these days it seems obvious to me that contributing to the development of another implementation of an "open" codec such as mpeg is not necessarily the greatest idea. Given all that has happened lately with codecs such as mp3, aac (yes, I know they are audio codecs but that's not the point), and others, doesn't it seem obvious that furthering these formats in any way is at best somewhat risky and could actually hamper future research and development of other free software? I do feel that there is definately a need for a free, cross-platform, high quality video codec, but I don't think mpeg-4 is the way to go. Why not work on an open source, patent free project like Ogg? As far as I know, there has already been some development on a video codec for the Ogg project and it seems that there are some very good ideas that are being planned. If vorbis is any indication of the kind of results we can expect from the rest of the Ogg project, then this, at least to me, definately seems to way to go. I say to hell with mpeg and all the patents and legal bs... let the open source community develop a REAL free opensource codec, and watch the corporations weep. If anyone is actually interested in this I would suggest the Ogg Project Homepage as a starting point.

MP3 is a proprietary format. They buy the rights to the MP3 format, and charge any site that distributes MP3's a "license fee" similar to the one that Unisys tried to levy against websites that use GIF's.

But Ogg is not, so everyone can (and should!) just switch to that.

"if the ID3 spec was extended to store an unlimited amount of data encoded as XML, right inside the MP3 file, one of the many cool things you could store is a digital signature. Note that this does not mean that the files are encrypted. They simply have a digital signature appended onto the end of them which can only have been created by a certain private key. Given the corresponding public key, which you need anyway to validate the signature, you can now have cryptographically secure voluntary transactions with the person who signed the file."

is that not fucking cool or what? ideally, i'd like to see this built into the ogg vorbis codec (http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ -- an open codec to mp3 obsolete, baby) right its inception. goddamn, we could actually yank the rug out from under the mpaa, the riaa, and all the other motherfuckers who are trying to achieve complete control over the means of distribution!

please, i beg of you, spread the memes! as a semi-serious musician, and a semi-serious cypherpunk who thinks that patterns can never be property (but that making music is a service), i think that the tipster protocol (or an fda-approved substitute ;) ) is exactly what the world needs with respect to the current "starving artists vs. record companies vs. incredible ease of distribution" digital music debate.

Seriously speaking, Vorbis is named after the Pratchett character, but Ogg is not named after Nanny.

Best regards,

January

P.S. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. :-P

For those who are curious, yes, it does appear that this usage of "ogg" was lifted from the netrek lexicon: http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html

The official Vorbis FAQ Ogg Vorbis uses the Ogg bistream format, and the correct extension is .ogg

you mean ogg vorbis?

Thomson Multimedia controls MP3 patent licensing. If the RIAA wants to stop MPEG Audio Layer 3, it could just work with Thomson to get the patent royalties upped. This will cause League for Programming Freedom to throw up a site called Burn All MP3s Day and everyone will go download Vorbis software from Xiph.org and re-rip their CDs.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Well, judging by this page pointed out in another thread, they're probably just streaming (Dolby) AC-3. No details about the network part, but the compression spec is here or here.

Same stuff that's on a lot of DVDs.

Just as a head's up, there's a plan to add a more flexible surround encoding to the Ogg Vorbis audio format.

That's only because MP3's lose quality, a lot. Well, at the standard 128k/s Try it. Get CD Paranoia for Linux or Exact Audio Copy for Windows. Get LAME to encode to MP3 for either platform. Encode to 128k/s. Now get a friend, or write a script, to randomly play the CD or MP3. I can tell the difference with junky computer speakers, forget about it on a stereo. 256k/s is much better, I've seen articles quote tests that no one can tell the difference.
-Hatta

The Mpeg Layer 3 format is freely usable by anyone.

No it can't; there's a USD 2.50 royalty per unit on encoders with a USD 15,000 per year minimum. For example, THOMSON multimedia already got BladeEnc to remove encoder binaries. And I heard they're going after LAME next.

You can hang it all together nicely with grip, too.

LAME Home Page

Grip home page

CDparanoia home page
--

Too clueless to use MPEG, or too clueful? MPEG is still caught up in patents, licenses, and lawsuits! Where were you when all the previous stories about Ogg Vorbis were being posted?

Admittedly, the lack of a good range of audio/video formats is irksome, but there is an .au feed which humble ol' sox can handle easily, no questions asked.

Here is a link to download a Lossless Predictive Audio Compression encoder for Linux (and the page I found it on).

PAC is very likely to be avalible for some other Unix, so it would (with a little work) probably work on Linux.