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MP3's Loss, Open Source's Gain
nadamsieee refers us to a piece up at Wired on the fallout from Microsoft's recent courtroom loss to Alcatel-Lucent over MP3 patents. From the article: "Alcatel-Lucent isn't the only winner in a federal jury's $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format... Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win."
And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.
Why is it always Ogg Vorbis? What about FLAC?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win."
Yet the title of the article says it's "Open Source's Gain"?
We shouldn't pretend that a patent cloud over MP3 means that everyone will move to Vorbis. The trouble is that the numerous patents for audio compression aren't limited to any specific format; they are patents on ideas and mathematical functions, like all software patents. So it's hard to say that Vorbis doesn't infringe just because it's open. Remember with patents, you are still liable even if you come up with the same idea independently.
So does anybody really know if there are any patent issues with Vorbis? Has an audit been done somewhere that I haven't heard about?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If mp3 gets fazed out, doesn't any one else get the sick feeling that the next "de facto" may be an inherently DRM encumbered format? This could be terrible. Hopefully ogg will take off more.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
of course is the fact that most people simply refer to digital music, regardless of format, as MP3's. Most people already have a digital music player that will not play FLAK or OGG. People have no desire, or know how to turn their multiple gig music collection into a new format.
Trust me, i would rather FLAK was the standard, but at least for the moment, it seems to have missed the boat.
I may of course be entirely wrong.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Actually the patents are more broadly defined than just MP3. FLAC, Ogg etc can also be affected.
And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win
Aaaand the more likely possibilty is: more fucking format wars. What fun. Good thing I don't listen to music anymore.
This is all just so much noise and fury signifying nothing. MP3 will never die. Vorbis will never become ubiquitous.
They have WMA.
I don't believe they did any wrong. They even paid Fraunhofer, who were widely known as the owners of the mp3 patent. Not telling anyone that they own any mp3 patent and then jumping at the biggest user is simply evil. This kind of abuse should be punished, even if it was not a pure software patent. M$'s WMP is pure software, so if the patent isn't one, then they wouldn't infringe it! The only good thing was in this that an american company was beaten american style. This might lead to some patent reform.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Portable Music Players will play whatever it's cheapest to get hardware for. Hardware decoders for WMA, AAC, and MP3 are easy to find and often high-quality because they're sold in high-volume. By contrast, decoders for Ogg Vorbis are harder to come by, and are less efficient because they're not high-volume (and thus competitively improved). Thus it may be worth it to just take a few-cent royalty hit as opposed to switching to a more expensive, less-efficient hardware decoder.
you cant kill the mp3
...
the mp3 will live on
ipod tried to kill the mp3
but they failed as they were SMITE to the ground
metallica tried to kill the mp3
but they failed as they were STRICKEN down to the ground
RIAA tried to kill the mp3
ha! ha! ha! ha!
they FAILED as they were thrown to the ground!!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! yeaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! yeaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
ledi aw ledi aw ledi aw ledidii awwwawww
No one can destroy the mp3
the mp3 will strike you down with a vicious blow
we are the vanquished foes of the mp3
we tried to win for why we do not know
No: the deal here is to make sure that patent applying to MP3 are expirering someday and that this widespread format can finally used without restriction.
Would I be right to worry that when I upgrade to the next Ubuntu release, or update within the release I'm running, that I might find several programs and libraries quietly dropping their MP3 support, leaving me with gigs of unplayable files?
Are linux distros about to get hit with a torrent of C&D letters?
OGG won't be able to take over completely from MP3 until most/all home stereos are able to play ogg CDs in the same way they can now play MP3 CDs, and until most/all personal music players can work with ogg files.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
time sox song.mp3 song.ogg
22.845u 0.336s 0:23.19 99.9% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
Not bad, cpu is only 2.4ghz. This was a 3.5mb mp3 and it ended up as a 2.9mb ogg.
FLR
As much as we may wish for Ogg Vorbis to succeed, the most likely beneficiary is AAC, simply because of iTunes' default settings. I strongly suspect AAC has already caught up to MP3 in popularity.
Most people just rip their CDs using the defaults, and thanks to the iPod, iTunes is surely the most popular digital audio program out there. I haven't heard with any patent threats to AAC, so I would suspect that more companies and people will move in that direction.
Bonus: AAC sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rate.
And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.
What about WMA, since it's an MS format I'm assuming that they don't have to deal with the same issues as mp3, and many other companies already support it on their products (car stereo, portable players, dvd players, etc). I'm not sure what the licensing terms are, but even if mp3 disappears it doesn't mean that an open format will automatically be the one to take the stage (not that I would mind in the least if ogg/flac support did increase)
I seem to remember that there are alternative firmwares floating out there for various ipod models. Would someone be kind enough to reply with a comprehensive explanation for where to get these alternate firmwares, what's involved in installation, and what benefit us ipod owners can expect?
M$ forbade ogg to users of their "plays for sure" DRM. This blatantly anti-competitive action was slapped down in the EU, and lamely explained as a "mistake", but is a reason every cheap "mp3 player" does not also play ogg vorbis like my Trekstore or my Zaurus does. The hardware issue is spurious and there are low resource vorbis codecs.
Software patents suck and I'm happy I have mostly avoided mp3. It was a pain to get in the first place and it's still a pain. Too lame will give you "mp3" for your cheap player without patent problems, but vorbis is technically superior. Most of my music is ogg and I don't have any real problems enjoying it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They have WMA.
and they can keep it. Low quality, large file size, DRM, mixed content executable, what's to love?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I prefer to keep a portable turntable in my pants. The vinyl tends to skip when I fart, but I can really hear the difference between crappy digital and the analog. The vinyl record sounds better too.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
This is probably really obvious, but why did they sue Microsoft instead of Fraunhaufer? It seems Fraunhaufer is the one selling a product based on Alcatel's patents. Wouldn't it make more sense to go to the source of the infringement instead of suing the customers?
All WP is claiming is that Xiph.org claimed it was patent free. Hardly 'final word' stuff. Especially given that it even admits their is some dissent (although from parties with an vested interest in saying so).
Huh? WMA at 64kbps sounds almost exactly like MP3@128kpbs. For the vast majority of people this is good enough - it's a lossy codec, for sakes.
> large file size,
OK now, WTF??
> DRM,
Well, um... if you enable a checkbox. I guess. Anyone can add DRM to any format, up to and including OGG. Are you expressing your dislike for the company or are you just ignorant about what DRM is?
> mixed content executable,
Excuse me?
> what's to love?
Well, your post here - that's for sure. FUD much?
If mp3 gets fazed out ...
MP3 will not get phased out, every digital device supports it, vast personal libraries are primarily MP3. To introduce a player on the market that does not play MP3 is suicidal. All that someone could do is not rip to MP3, but that will largely just push customers to use 3rd party apps. Both MS and Apple have failed to convince a large segment of their respective users to stop using MP3, even though they both have alternative DRM-free formats. Why use DRM-free AAC when storage space is cheap and MP3 has far better compatibility?
Just because formats are open source doesn't mean that they don't infringe on patents, it just means they haven't been sued yet.
Why? Because patent holders that litigate tend to do so because they're waiting for the pot to be big enough to be worth litigating over. It's not like someone defending a trademark, at least not under US Patent law.
AAC is royalty free and better than MP3. You only need a license for certain purposes, which your computer manufacturer, media player etc. probably has bundled just fine (iTunes for example, which is .. for free)
Arguably it's better quality and smaller than Vorbis too, which for all intents and purposes could well be patented somehow somewhere, just hasn't been tested yet. At least you know where you stand with AAC.
Let's face it, there won't be a wide adoption for Ogg or FLAC until it's easy to File>Import one of those formats in iTunes. The fact that Microsoft/Zune is fighting Lucent/Alcatel is a non-issue. Zune is not likely to challenge iPod anytime soon. After years of using winamp, I finally caved and am using iTunes only because it's the only portal into my beautiful Video iPod. Windows Media Player isn't generally the media player of choice for anyone I know and neither is the Zune player. So what if MS is having trouble with the MP3 crowd. That's like saying Konquerer is having trouble integrating Flash player. They're not the market leader, so who cares?
Now if it were Apple vs Alcatel/Lucent...
Acutally, all formats may be in danger. The Alcatel-Lucent-Bell Labs patent is very generic and can theoretically be applied to all digital audio formats.
t ails-on-alcatels-15-b-win-against-microsoft/
http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/24/patent-monkey-de
So suppose I'm making a videogame, one area I find that OGG is popular in. You are absolutely limited to a dual layer DVD for storage space, no publisher will go over that. In reality, I probably have to try to fit it on 4 or 5 CDs and/or a SL DVD. There are still plenty of computers with CD-ROMs only, with otherwise new hardware, so DVD only releases are somewhat rare. Ok so we have to consider the audio assets. Sound effects are a big deal, they are often stored in a lightly compressed or uncompressed format. However music and voice, well that's another thing entirely. Suppose you want a fairly robust soundtrack at like 2 hours and you want a lot of voice acting, which pushes 10 hours (not at all hard to do).
So the music is 44.1khz, 16-bit, 2-tracks, the voice you cut down a bit and do 22khz, 16-bit 1 track. That's about 2.6GB uncompressed. FLAC tends to get around 50% compression, so 1.3GB or so. Ouch. That requires over 2 CDs to do. If I'm on a DVD it's still a good amount of space. If we want to stick to a SL DVD, that means only 3.4GB for all other assets.
Now what if we go OGG? Well for speech we can easily go 64k. We can probably even push it to less if we want but 64k should give great speech quality. For music we could go pretty low since it is in game (UT 2004 is only 96-128k) but heck, we'll be generous and say 256k which is "CD Quality" on everything but the very best gear. That totals about 500MB. Much better, under a single CD now and nearly a 3x savings over FLAC. We can easily halve that again by going 32k and 128k respectively and still probably sound great to the vast majority of users.
For a music collection, sure use FLAC. It's your drive, you determine how much space you want to buy. For games, however, you need to be economical about it. You don't want your assets taking up more space then they have to, that can artificially limit your market.
Although I'm essentially a moderate person, I do believe that some sociopathic behavior does merit capital punishment for the pain and suffering that it can inflict on the innocent. The act of casually converting one lossy audio format to another passes my personal litmus test in that regard.
So when does the MP3 patent(s) run out anyhow?
Seems like its been around for a while.
Out of curiosity, when does this patent expire?
*sigh* back to work...
Not quite. AAC is both patent AND license encumbered. You don't have to pay anyone to distribute or stream in AAC format, but you sure do if you want to make a decoder or an encoder. Incidentally, fraunhaufer and others made AAC.
You are incorrect on your second count, too. Until you get above 128Kb rates Ogg beats AAC and MP3. Above this rate, most people cannot tell the difference between any of them.
On a side note, the AAC-HE encoder from Apple is excellent and on par with the best available for lossy encoding.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Patents are good for 20 years.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
FTA (last paragraph)
The second is that the same patents now being squabbled over by licensors of the MP3 codec could eventually threaten Ogg Vorbis. "To this day, we still have lawyers tell us they won't support Ogg because Thomson would come after them," Montgomery said.
Why would this threaten Ogg Vorbis? Seriously I am not trolling.
Pretty near all the concert recordings are .flac these days and many of the CD rips are flac too. I have almost no lossy codecs in my music collection. It does span many gigabytes but they are not expensive. I can squeeze a .wav about in half with HQ settings.
iTunes is by no means the only way to get content onto your iPod. There are multiple ways for multiple platforms; all you need to do is look.
WinAmp plays all formats including WMA, WMP, MP3, MP4, ACC.
I'm not sure what you're saying is accurate.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Repost:
p ermeganet
by alx5000 (896642) Alter Relationship on 03:10 PM February 27th, 2007 (#18174468)
(http://vistoenbp.net/)
I want my... I want my Mp3...
I want my... I want my Mp3...
Now look at them Lucents
That's the way you do it
You play your music on your Mp3
That ain't workin'!
That's the way you do it
Get your money for patents
and your suits for free
Now that ain't workin'
That's the way you do it
Lemme tell you these guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a lawsuit for your little codec
Maybe get a lawsuit for your Zune
We gotta install class action lawyers
Custom codec circuitery
We gotta move these patent infringements
We gotta move these Alcatel bills
[...]
--
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=Compuglobalhy
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The open-source programs that use MP3 have always been on uncertain legal ground in many countries including the US. Many of them have received C&D letters from Fraunhofer - the other patent holder, and recognized licenser of MP3 related patents. The way that LAME gets around this is by choosing a license that only allows use for non-commercial research purposes (allowed by US patent laws). Others get around it by basing their operations in countries where the laws are different. It has been this way for years.
That is why Ogg vorbis development was started over decade ago. That is why the codecs for MP3 and other proprietary formats are no longer included in the base install of many distros (including ubuntu last I checked). It is up to the user to install the packages from the non-free repository, and they are responsible for determining if those packages are legal in their country.
In the end the liability is most likely on the user (the Microsoft vs ATT case will make that more clear), not the developer or distributer. The distros and projects may be hit with C&D letters, but there is no reason to think that they will stick anymore than than the ones in the past.
This ruling primarily affect companies that had been paying patent royalties to Fraunhofer, and thought they were in the clear. Groups that have never payed royalties are in the exact same position that they have always been always in.
It is obvious that the core of the current dilemma with respect to the MP3 format revolves around patents, patents that are licensed across national borders no less (Fraunhofer IIS being the German research organization previously recognized as the sole patent holder for the technology involved in encoding and decoding MP3s). But within the framework of discussing a movement away from the MP3 format as a result of ambiguity on the legal weight behind Alcatel-Lucent's claims (which were obviously convincing enough to defeat Microsoft's well-funded lawyer teams in a United States federal court of law), we must examine the source of the format's omnipresence in the first place. Yes, $1.65 billion USD is nothing to sneeze at, and if Microsoft's appeal doesn't go through, there will very well be a motivation for other big players on the market to drop MP3 encoding support from their audio products (it remains to be seen if Alcatel-Lucent's patents also cover decoding).
But why is MP3 the de facto audio format in the market? The true reason has nothing to do with Fraunhofer, their patents, and especially not Alcatel-Lucent. It was merely the only viable format for copying and transferring audio files at the pivotal point in the evolution of the Internet when it become viable to do so. Nullsoft's Winamp provided out-of-the box support for MP3s in 1997, followed by the release of Napster in 1999 which kickstarted the real explosion of music trading, almost solely in MP3 format. The average person today who has a digital music collection has the majority of their files in the MP3 format. This lawsuit will not compel them to covert these files to Ogg Vorbis, especially if the much more tangible benefits of higher quality per filesize ratio has not already enticed them (not to mention the quality degradation of conversion from one lossy format to another).
So, Microsoft got nailed for including MP3 encoding support in Windows Media Player. But in all of this speculation about the industry migrating away from MP3 as a result of this lawsuit, did anyone stop to consider that MP3 is not even the default format that WMP encodes to? And sure, iTunes has support for encoding to MP3 as well, but is the default not to rip to MPEG-4 AAC from digital audio CDs? And even so, none of this changes the fact that MP3 is still the most commonly used file format for audio files on Bit Torrent, Usenet, IRC, etc. Most organized ripping groups use LAME anyway, so it's not as if they aren't already using software that infringes upon patents once compiled. No, it's quite obvious that patents have little to nothing to do with MP3's claim to fame as the most popular digital audio format, just as it should be readily apparent that dubious patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent will have nothing to do with any sort of mass migration away from the MP3 format in the next couple of years.
It's 2007. Any significant gains for the Free/Open Source community will come when the MP3 patent expires in 2010 and GNU/Linux distributions can include support for the format by default, sans royalties. It's naive to think that anything significant will happen with respect to some sort of organic migration away from one of the most classic examples of "format inertia" within the next three years, be it corporate-backed or not.
- They turn around 180 degrees and include a Vorbis decoder with every version of Windows.
- They advertise WMA even more than before.
Emphasizing, again, that this is Microsoft, which do you think seems more likely?But what handheld device runs Winamp software?
- Ogg is a container like Matroshka (MSK) or AVI (but better than that one. Almost anything is better than AVI)
- Vorbis is a sound codec, just like AAC.
FLAC is a format that considers both the compression codec AND the container (something like MPEG : you have both codecs, like MPEG-2 MPEG-4, MPEG Audio Layer III, and containers like MPEG Programm (MPG files)).
You can have a stand alone FLAC file (with one given container format) or by using another switch on the command line, you can have FLAC compressed audio inside an OGG container.
The first is called "Native FLAC", the second "Ogg FLAC". See here
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In addition to several "no-name" asian breand, most of current Samsung models play OGG (next to MP3 and WMA) out-of-the-box. And that's a brand that is quite widespread in shops.
Several older asian player, that were mostly pure software player, with a general purpose processor and decompression implemented as a interger/fixed-point software in the firmware, can be flashed to add support for additional formats (ie.: using official plugins from the constructor, no need to completly replace the firmware with RockBox).
Also, most PDA and SmartPhone (except the future locked-iPhone) can install software player that support playing OGGs from the flash media (or from the internal drive if you happen to have some model like the LifeDrive). TCPMP is such an example for Palm OS and Win CE.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hydrogenaudio has lots of THIRD-WORLD users, whom readily admit they use cheap headphones and cheap computer sound gear. They can notice the different grades of crap, but that's all. They can never experience the true clarity of what I call Hi-Fi.
that due true ABX
No! It's "do"! In some parts of the world they sound very different ("do" is "do", but "due" is "jew") and such spelling mistakes can make it very difficult to understand.
One quick way of getting it right is if you can change it to "did", then it's "do". (The reverse isn't always the same.)
True, but the average iTunes user will never look. They have 11457 mp3's from the Napster days and are interested in whatever is easy.
Offer all of it. mp3, ogg vorbis, and flac. Maybe I missed a popular one. In each lossy format, offer, 128, 192, 256, and 320 bit rates. Maybe only two of those bit rates.
Yes, this means 9 files (4 mp3, 4 ogg, and 1 flac) per file. But it won't affect your bandwidth much, since each person is only going to download one file anyway, maybe two if they try out the low quality ones before downloading the flac. Hopefully, space isn't a consideration for you. It usually isn't when hosting. And you can use a script to rip all of the songs in all nine formats.
Your customers/viewers/friends won't all be happy with the same format. Make them all happy by offering everything. There is little to no reason not to.
I was under the impression that the people who made Vorbis specifically designed it to avoid infringing on any patents.
That's the claim, but I don't think it's mathematically possible to ensure that any creation doesn't infringe on at least one of the claims of the quadrillion patents out there, especially ones issued on the obvious. A keyword search probably isn't sufficient, especially if the claims might be in patents in only tangentially related fields.
As long as patent examiners are financially penalized for questioning or initially rejecting patents (they only get paid for opening and disposing of a case) while at the same time there aren't nearly enough examiners - this ain't gonna change.
Even if vorbis could be cited as prior art against a newly awarded patent, there's nothing to stop the patent holders from filing infringement suits against the vorbis folks and costing them a ton of money in defense ($1M average).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But that's part of the problem with the USPTO and software patents in general: "the mp3 patent" doesn't exist, just as the LZW patent didn't exist. There were at least 2 patents covering something one would do with LZW compression (one held by Unisys, the other by IBM). This simultaneously points to the incompetence of the USPTO and the ridiculous difficulty of their task.
Digital Citizen
We are sheep because we don't share your opinion? Interesting classification. It contains the self-contradictory notion that if everyone did as you wished, they would just be sheep with a different shepherd.
The way I see it, there is no "lock-in monopoly" of the MP3 format. Any MP3 player company could easily switch their entire player to play the OGG format, and have their software convert music to OGG instead of MP3 (of course, you've still got the problem of the software having to read MP3, but at least that's a lot less problematic than having the actual device do it).
I foresee one huge problem though for anyone switching their player to OGG: This industry has the fatal problem of being called "MP3 players", not "digital music players" or anything of the sort. Therefore any "OGG players" would likely be seen as a "cheap knockoff". Why did we create this industry and call it after a patented format?
(In other words, we're not technologically constrained by the format, but market-wise constrained).
The only player who is really in the clear of this is Apple - it's not an "MP3 player", it's an "iPod". They could jump out of MP3.
Just kidding...
Mind the frickin' laser...
If you are anywhere above 15 year old, chance is that above 40khz you hear nothing (which is why the "teenager supressor" function so well : they emit very high frequency that anybody with hair beside above the head cannot hear, or at least the majority). No transform that 40khz back to a number of bit per second, and you will see that anybody hearing a difference is either fooling itself, or has not yet reached drinking age, or is one of those rare 1 out of 10000 which keep a good hearing above that frequency for a few years more. Seeing that the third case is a rarity, chance is that if you hear a diffrence, and have a real driving licence, then you are fooling yourself.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
. . . and continue using grip and lame.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm serious, if I'm trading music with you and you give me some neckbeardy ogg vorbis shit that is supported by nothing, I'm going to be pissed. Seriously, you can whine on for hours about why your shit is better, but that won't make me care. Give me mp3, it's supported by everything, and I get a secret amount of glee from the fact that the self-righteous shits on slashdot want me to use something different. Bite me!
These are the targets to hit. Never mind uncle Billy's 78s, or cousin Joe's 45s. Sure, encoding those is cool, but your average user is infinitely more likely to be watching the latest movie or a trailer for the IMAX down the street.
IMHO, MP3 is so wide of the real mark that it's not worth bothering to consider as competition. People listen to MP3s for the same reason they watch camcorder-copied movies - it sucks so bad it's not funny but realistic alternatives aren't always available. If you gave them a realistic alternative that could play professional-quality sound at very close to professional quality without requiring them to buy terabytes of extra space, I'm as certain as I can be that people would adopt it. What is the point in them buying high-end professional sound cards if there are no sounds to play? It's as simple as that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Correct. And, knowing MS's pervasive influence, they'll just move to WMA, and call it a Good Thing(TM).
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The two essential ones are 128k mp3 and FLAC. The mp3 is for streaming, to see if I like it, and because everyone else uses them. The FLAC is so I can have the full quality, and re-encode to Vorbis when I start running out of space.
Really, unless you're going to tweak the encoders by hand, you should just go with pretty default settings for anything you can legally and automatically encode to. I'd like a 128k mp3, a VBR mp3, a Vorbis at default settings, an AC3 if you've got surround, and a Flac -- but feel free to throw up Speex, whatever.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
1.3 gigs starts to look a lot less significant, unless you're worried about disk space once people actually install it.
But even on single-layer, consider -- I seem to remember Half-Life 2 was around a gig, and still looks damned good.
It's a problem if you're still using CDs, sure, but that depends on the game you're making. If you're indie, then you need to keep it under 50 megs, so people can download it. If you're mainstream and trying to make it look good, you probably want to at least offer a DVD version. DVD drives cost maybe $10 more than CD drives now -- maybe -- and come with most new computers unless you build your own, and (stupidly) stick to a CD drive only. Switching CDs during an install is just damned annoying, but with a DVD, I can even see being able to play a game while it installs, and when it's done installing, you just pop the disk out and keep playing, uninterrupted.
Really, if you spend $200 on a video card, you can afford to spend $50 on a DVD drive. And if most gamers don't bother with DVD drives, maybe developers need to force the issue -- it would be a lot more helpful than what you already do with forcing people to upgrade their video card every couple years.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Maybe so. But you said you'd caved in, and since you're here I assume you have the ability to go out and look for such things.
Take it for what it's worth: You have it from a guy on the internet :)
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
are you a hot?
Some people think the formats are really open.. but because many of those so called opensource formats haven't been checked to see if it really is patentfree.. And I bet my money that a lot of formats think they are patentfree, but in fact aren't... ofcourse patentfree formats are the way to go...
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Call the cops?
You can get players for Ogg. You can transcribe to MP3 (since MP3 has lower fidelity, you don't see quite the degradation as MP3->Vorbis).
So what are you bitching about, goober?
If I recall correctly, mp3 itself is up in 2009 or 2010. I don't know about the rest.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Bait and switch indeed, I'm becoming a conspiracy theorist. To me, the patent game is just part of the strategy room of big (tech.) business. It is the place where the largest companies flex their muscles and use business and political clout to negatively influence the ecosystem and ultimately penalize the consumer. In this case big business, and I'd argue Microsoft wins regardless. If they pay the unreasonable and discriminatory damages they set precedent and leave Lucent to follow suit with software, and consumer electronics manufacturers worlwide. Think about: 1. The hundreds of millions or billions of devices that have added mp3 playback to leverage our (the consumers) interest in open, interoperable digital audio. - Does Pioneer stop adding mp3 compatibility to car stereos? - What happens to the iPod? - Certainly we pay more, a lot more if M$ was paying $16M to Thomson. - This damages bill is 100x and could push pricing out of reach for use. 2. Who looses if the record labels can't make content available in mp3, sans DRM. - I noticed EMI was asking too much for the right to distribute their songs in mp3 for Microsoft and Apple to pay. http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/26/164210.shtml - What happens here if Microsoft pays the damages? Forget about mp3 for a while 3. Who looses if the mobile phone industry starts arguing about which audio compression technology to use. Consumers. Everyone in the business of closed networks (Lucent, ATT etc.) wins. Oh...wait, doesn't Microsoft own a big stake in ATT...come on.... Ultimately, by manifesting this decision, big business has once again conspired to ensure consumers lose. We'll pay more than ever for the ability to play and create digital audio that moves freely from one device to another. Either that or we'll have to use something other than mp3, and try to get it penetrated from PC, to Consumer Electronics. A new solution would have to be something other than open source, because manufactures will look for legal protection from whoever they license this crap from. If they use open source, or proprietary technology they're nearly guaranteed to use essential patents, and this equates to screaming, "me next, I want to pay a billion." No doubt, Dolby will offer us AAC, or Dolby Digital. Microsoft will offer wma(I hope they get nailed with antitrust here too). Either way we're stuck with supporting the monopoly, increasing fees, and increasing lock-in of big business because "our" court system supports unreasonable and discriminatory patent claims made for the benefit of big biz! Time for a revolution in patent law and time to change our government. One day, someone will figure out how to free the media from this crap and everything will change.
No gym for home, work out floor with 30, but is it for 20 like 30 lb when you no lift it to be for men, for 30 lbs instead? or half is 10 for 20 pounds?
let me simplify
u take 20 lbs no lifting for 30lb if guy, so divide 2 u dont sit, u get 10 but for guy it no 30, so 20 would be for guy if u werent a girl ?
For example, I have an Archos somethingorother (I forget the model #). As I recall, it uses a commercial chip MP3 decoder. Who would be in patent violation in this case, Archos or the chip vendor? I would think the chip vendor might have an agreement with Fraunhofer, which might let Archos off the patent hook? Or is it not strictly that it's MP3, but that it's MP3+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out ? In which case, I'd be surprised they didn't specify audio_codec+hard disk+battery+display+audio_in/out in the patent and cover ALL codecs, not just MP3. Also, wouldn't a laptop qualify for those conditions? The Windows case appears to be a matter of simply MP3 software, while the case described in the OP would appear to be hardware connected...
Wak! I wrote that after reading the Register article about Texas MP3-- which is what I was thinking when I said OP... At any rate, the two cases seem to have some similarities but also some important differences as I tried to point out in my post...
IANAPL but...
Just to add to this, for an invention to infringe a particular claim, it must be doing all the things stated in that claim. If at any stage one can say "this invention does not do that" then one can ignore that claim.
For the grandparent poster, in this instance I was just pointing out that some compressors don't transform into the frequency domain and thus the claims can be ignored.