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MPEG 4, Windows Media 9 At War
Andy Tai writes "According to this
News.com report, backers of MPEG 4 are protesting Microsoft's licensing fee structure for Windows Media 9, which is up to 50% less than MPEG 4's. They accuse Microsoft of blocking the progress to move to an 'open standard' (MPEG 4), posing unfair competition and threatening consumer choice. Of course, what is really needed is a third choice, a totally Free Software media codec solution that's competitive with both Windows Media and MPEG 4."
MP3 is the audio codec used in MPEG1. MP3 is short for MPEG1 LAYER 3. It is not MPEG3 (audio/video codec).
You don't understand what an mp3 is.
mp3 IS NOT MPEG3. It is MPEG1, layer 3.
MPEG4 is not an mp3 replacement.
See this for details.
Mencoder is not a codec. It uses other codecs.
From a free software purists point of view, does it matter who wins? Neither format is an "open" format.... MPEG-4 may be developed by an industry consortium, but as with so-called RAND licencing, unless I misunderstand something their licencing fees make it impossible to implement the code legally in free software. (Is this the case? I'm guessing that MPlayer's mpeg4 support is dubious legally.)
What would be best is that if they make it contentions and messy enough fighting each other that both standards are weakend. That will make Ogg Theora look even that much more attractive to companies and the world at large once it comes out, and hasten the support of Ogg Theora. With some luck, that will become the standard, or at least a standard, that is so widely supported that those of us who care about and pay attention to these things can just use it.
-Rob
Wrong,
it's the abuse of a monoply position to unfairly leverage another market.
So if they bundle WMP9 with a monopoly product and then set the licensing at a loss making level then that's unfair, since there leveraging a monopoly product (windows) by intergrating WMP9, and then undercutting the competition on content costs.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
No. DivX (5) is an implementation of MPEG4. It may be free for you to download and use, but there would still be royalty implications if you were to use it in your own application.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but Ogg Vorbis is not a replacement for MPEG4. Vorbis competes with MP3, which means "Mpeg-1 Layer 3". Obviously, the audio layer. MPEG-4 is a next generation A/V standard, like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
Currently we have no Free Software alternative to these codecs, tho OGG Theora may be done in the next year.
I'm surprised people even think about OpenDivX today. OpenDivX is dead, for a long time now (more than a year).
In case you didn't know what happened: Project Mayo suddenly closed the CVS, removed the source code and used that source code to create their own, proprietary DivX 4 codec. OpenDivX isn't developed anymore. It's codebase is dead. The latest release (from more than a year ago) is full of bugs.
Oh, and DivX is not OpenDivX in case you didn't know. They are 2 completely different things.
MS can give money to the companies/people using this and raise the price on WinXP/Office and make a profit anyway. (And yes, I know they are not related but IE wasn't that either.)
The MPEG group can't do that. And thats why they think it's unfair. They have to earn money on the actual product or they can't survive.
I couldn't care less about this one though because we need a truly open standard for video.
Buy taking Netscape out of the market, many web sites only work correctly with IE and windows(maybe mac).
Also there is no choice, or very little.
If Microsoft price standards bodies out of existence then there will be no non M$ standards (ok gross oversimplification), open standards tend to be free for free use.
Standards bodies should really be not for profit.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
No.
MPEG-4 is open because all implementation details are public. You can get a copy of the standard, and build your encoder, decoder, server, etcetera based on it. No NDA's to sign or anything. You have to pay license fees in some cases if you distribute commerical products, but writing the software is something anyone can do.
This isn't true with Windows Media 9. While some details are avalable, not all are, and some are under restrictive licenses.
My video compression blog
Standards bodies should really be not for profit.
I agree with that. Also, if mpeg4 was a free standard, then Microsoft would be forced to compete on quality alone, and not price.
No, DivX Networks pays their licensing fee to MPEG-LA. If you write an app that uses their codec, you don't have to pay an additional fee for the video codec.
My video compression blog
Does anyone remember that browsers didn't use to be free until Internet Explorer came along ?
Netscape was de-facto free well before IE came along. Early on, they figured that they needed to get the browser out to everybody to make it THE platform. Anyone that actually paid for it, well that was found money. They really wanted to make money from servers, bu Apache and IIS killed them on this.
Despite the fact that MP3 is an audio-only standard and MPEG4 is a video-only standard, just this: MP3!=MPEG3 doesn't quite cover it all. Because MPEG3 doesn't exist. First there was MPEG1, which is what was used for things like VideoCD. It has several "layers". Layer-1 is the video layer, Layer-2 is an audio layer, and Layer-3 is an compression type for audio-only streams. Normal MPEG1 have only Layer-2 audio. The there was MPEG2 which is what is used for DVD's. Then there was a whole lot of nothing, some designspecs for MPEG2.5 and MPEG3 but nothing specific. And finally MPEG4 (they skipped 2.5 and 3 entirely). So confusing MP3 with the videostandard MPEG3 is a bit weird, since it doesn't exist.
DivX 4.12 comes rather close to being MPEG-4 compliant, but I'd personally recommend XviD which is a GPL'ed implementation of MPEG-4. As such, there are some licensing issues, but it is probably the best MPEG-4 codec there is. DivX 3.11 is really good, but there are serious legal issues as well as future compatibility problems. There might be made a program that can convert DivX 3.11 AVI files to ISO MPEG-4 though. Read about that here. Here are a few quick URLs:
Doom9. The site about MPEG-4 encoding (and SVCDs and DVD-ripping).
Koepi's XviD site. Has binaries. Be gentle on the server folks... we don't want it slashdotted.
Doom9 also has a quick tutorial to make XviD do as you want. It's probably not optimal, but it ought to guarantee that you don't end up with a piece of crap.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Him: "What about them? It's easy for people to recreate technologies once the expensive research has been done, Vorbis is based on similar ideas to MP3 for instance. Creating them in the first place takes money though, who's going to do that if all the codecs have to be free of charge?"
At that point I usually shut up, because I don't have a good answer.
I'll help you. The answer is science. This old fashioned thing they do on universities. There are these people called scientists, who gave and many still give a flying shit about "patent license fees". Without them, all these "lots of smart people" working on compression schemes would still live in a cage and go in the woods to berry for their daily food.
The idea that mp3 was so original that ogg wouldn't exist without it is blatantly wrong. At best, it showed that there is a market for that which motivated the creator, but nothing more.
All the foundations were well known long before mp3 emerged.
Has MSFT ever undersold competitors and then jacked up prices as we all phear?
Yes. They undercut WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 with the relatively cheap early releases of MS Office. Now MS Office retails for over $500US.