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

The MusicKeg does not play Ogg Vorbis at this time

[calle42]

The Music Keg is based on the PhatBox car audio system, and neither supports OggVorbis in the car at this time. Only the accompanying Windows software lets you encode CDs into .ogg, nothing more. There's still hope though, here's a quote from the Vorbis mailing list from Vince Busam, who seems to be one of the developers of the PhatBox:

The PhatBox (and Music Keg) will support Ogg as soon as FREE libraries are available which will run on the ARM 7. If anybody is working towareds such a goal, please let me know. I can test it out on the PhatBox, and incorporate it into future upgrades.

Music Keg DOES NOT (yet) support OGG!

[Vince]

Nowhere does the Kenwood Music Keg (PhatNoise PhatBox) claim to support Ogg. The author of the article must have mis-read some of the literature which clearly states that Ogg is only supported in the (Windows) desktop software. The author also overstates the capabilities of the Kenwood X959, which does NOT play mpeg files, just short animations which can be loaded into the head unit's memory via CD-Rs.

The Kenwood Music Keg runs Linux, and can be upgraded to support Ogg when free ARM decoding libraries are available. Also, there are Linux utilities for managing playlists on the Music Keg.

Re:DivX vs Ogg Tarkin

[hexix]

Tarkin is nowhere near complete and is not very usable yet.

I have no clue where Tarkin is at but this was posted to Gnome's desktop-devel list today:

Subject: Cool news of the Day
From: Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller

Hi dudes,
I just wanted to let you all know that as of yesterday GStreamer has
support for encoding and decoding of Ogg Tarkin video. So now you can
convert all your DivX movies to Ogg Tarkin with the help of GStreamer.

I also think that makes the GStreamer mediaplayer the first mediaplayer
to support Ogg Tarkin :)

Christian

The story of divx.

[kesuki]

College kid gets into WMV Scene, starts hacking Releases 'DivX ;-)' which is two seperate version of WMV the older one 'Slow motion' and the newer one 'fast motion' and removes some other things M$ put in WMV to make it not good for High res movies.
College kid gets a lot of press, and gets sued out of existance. Domain host sells domain to a 'smarter' college kid who starts ProjectMayo and levereges all the hype to start 'OpenDivX.' Since he's not a coder, he goes out and takes an open source MPEG-4 implementation and credits it's author as per the licence agreement but violates the licence agreement in that he releases it under the "OpenDivx License" which allows him to Close Source it once people on the internet have made changes to improve it.
In the meantime he's found venture capital and even gotten good press, now he can hire programmers. He uses the "OpenDivx" license to make "DivX" a closed source Patent Pending Mpeg-4 implementation. To avoid legal problems he claims this was written from scratch -- but noone can prove that because it's closed source. This play was invented by Microsoft when they bought QDOS and used it to 'write from scratch' DOS 1.0. So the kid isn't stupid--at least he's learned from the best.
Kid needs more funding finds a friend in the creators of the mp3 codec.

The only thing I'm not 100% sure about is that the kid who got sued for DivX ;-) is really different from the one who started project Mayo. I don't see how they could be the same person though, Microsoft has more Sharks than Seaworld.