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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 $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format... Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win."
And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.
Why is it always Ogg Vorbis? What about FLAC?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If mp3 gets fazed out, doesn't any one else get the sick feeling that the next "de facto" may be an inherently DRM encumbered format? This could be terrible. Hopefully ogg will take off more.
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of course is the fact that most people simply refer to digital music, regardless of format, as MP3's. Most people already have a digital music player that will not play FLAK or OGG. People have no desire, or know how to turn their multiple gig music collection into a new format.
Trust me, i would rather FLAK was the standard, but at least for the moment, it seems to have missed the boat.
I may of course be entirely wrong.
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I don't believe they did any wrong. They even paid Fraunhofer, who were widely known as the owners of the mp3 patent. Not telling anyone that they own any mp3 patent and then jumping at the biggest user is simply evil. This kind of abuse should be punished, even if it was not a pure software patent. M$'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.
I understand the attempt at humor, but you may be more correct than you intended. Without really knowing the details, my understanding of this patent was that everybody thought they have already complied, but some portion of the patent was effectively backdated and became a "new" requirement for full licensing. There may yet be patents that Vorbis violates that have not surfaced, which are applicable to the code base and predate the Vorbis development. That would suck.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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?
BZZZZZZZZZZT! No way! At least not for anyone who enjoys listening to music, as distinct from people you enjoy carefully discerning something vaguely musical from a bunch of garbled noise. MP3 and vorbis are both lossy codecs, so the mp3 you start with is already missing information, you convert that to wav, you're still missing that information, you convert that to vorbis, you throw out more information and degrade the audio.
It's worse than dubbing tape to tape because of the nature of the formats. With tape you get a bit of hiss and mild degradation for each generation, subject to the quality of the equipment you use for dubbing. With lossy digital compression you get crappy sounding artifacts, in the same way as heavily compressing a jpeg gives you visual artifacts. Even though vorbis is technically better than mp3, and subjectively sounds better, it doesn't improve an mp3 sample, it kills it and that's not an option.
In my case, the only reason I use mp3 at all is that there is a player in my phone. IIRC vorbis is more complicated to decode and therefore more of a drain on power. This may have changed with hardware decoders, but if everything switches to vorbis, I'll need a new player or a new phone and mp3 player because a firmware upgrade wont cut it.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Time to go back to .au files.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
We shouldn't pretend that a patent cloud over MP3 means that everyone will move to Vorbis.
The chilling effect is the fact Microsoft did pay for the MP3 format. Even though they had a fully paid up license, another party claimed otherwise and won. It would be just like having a fully licensed copy of Windows Vista and Apple winning a lawsuit against you for the 3D desktop effects and winning.
It calls questions the liability of propery licensed software of any kind and expecialy software codecs. Having a license from the license holder is not good enough anymore. This alone may drive the move to formats without such an obvious liability.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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