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MPEG 4, Windows Media 9 At War

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stop-being-cheaper dept.

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."

1 of 523 comments (clear)

  1. Confusing Codec Crap by Threed · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    I am not a professional video artist of any kind. I have a TV capture device that spits out MPEG 1 video files which I then drop into VirtualDub for editing and converting to AVI. Currently, I use DivX 4.1 and MP3 to cut my favorite half-hour TV programs from almost 400 MB to less than 150 MB.

    To maintain maximum freedom and guarantee future viewability (and hopefully not giving up much hard disk space), what codecs SHOULD I be using?