Good News On Two Open-Codec Fronts

davidu writes: "The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany (makers of the mp3 codec) licensed the divx ;-) video codec for future use. This is good for users because the codec is open source and is now on its way to becoming a standard. For those who don't know, this is unrelated to the failed Circuit City program, hence the smiley. ;-)" On the audio side of things, Mike Hicks writes: "Saw this on LWN's Daily Updates. Kenwood has come up with a car audio playing system that understands the Ogg Vorbis compression format, the Music Keg. Me want.. Time to start digging for spare change in the couch ..." Update: 02/05 03:24 GMT by T : Two clarifications below put a slight damper on each of these, though the overall news is still good.

Vince Busam from Phatnoise writes: "The author of the mp3newswire article goofed big time! Nowhere does it state that the Keg plays Ogg files, only the desktop software. Ogg will be supported when free ARM libraries are available. The author is further incorrect when he mentions the Kenwood X959 plays MPEG video files on the tiny OLE display. I have no idea where he got that idea." And reader Guspaz points out: "OpenDivX is indeed opensourced, but it is not the same as DivX 4, which was what was liscenced (And is what people download to use)."

Comments

Way too small

[flacco]

10GB?? WTF am I supposed to do with 10GB? I already have nearly 60GB of music files (I encode nearly everything at 320).

For that matter, at some point I'm going to rip everything again to WAVs or some lossless compression format, and that's probably going to double or quadruple my space requirements.

So the question is - Is it hackable?

Another win for piracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I mean, open source and freedom of information.

maybe one day..

[evilpaul13]

I'll be able to play all my Divx movies on a set box dvd player afterall?