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Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3?
An anonymous reader asks: "Ogg Vorbis is hitting stable and hopefully will release 1.0 soon. But I'm wondering, who is going to use it? MP3 is very popular on the net and beyond, but it's based on patents. Software patents aren't legal in Europe, but are in other parts of the world. Is Ogg Vorbis making a chance to become the next music-standard for the net and beyond. This mainly because there are no patents broken by this standard. Will it be a standard for the world or one for the books?"
Never having bothered to do it before with MP3, I've recently started ripping my CD collection to .ogg files, and the quality is good to my (tin) ears. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent needs to sell a dedicated hardware player that takes CD-Rs, so I can play back 10 hours of books on tape from a single disk. I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?
Lets see. MP3 plays in:
Media Player, Winamp, My CD player, my iPAQ, some cellphones, Real player on multiple platforms, Sony's Clie, and bunches of solid state portables....
Ogg Vorbis plays on:
Ogg Vorbis won't usurp MP3 because MP3 is already PERVASIVE.
Just because us geeks say it's open source, doesn't mean that Mazda gives a crap about it. (with their MP3 econocar...guess what it plays and what it DOESN'T)
Yeah, patents are 'old school'. They're not viable when faced with the law of the masses. If the majority want to infringe a patent, well, they've just democratically determined the patent null and void. They're still applicable to old school businesses of course, but then in the case of GIF and MP3, they're not the key infringers. You might as well prosecute the odd pirate in the far east, but it's a token victory. These days, putting a patent on a popular piece of digital technology is equivalent to slapping a GPL license on it, i.e. the only people who are going to use it are those who use it non-commercially (and a few who can afford to pay big bucks). So, more patents please! They're just banging more and more nails in the coffin of commercial licensability of technology.