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MP3's Loss, Open Source's Gain

Posted by kdawson on from the chicken-or-the-ogg dept.

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."

9 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. is storage that big of an issue anymore? by User+956 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
    1. Re:is storage that big of an issue anymore? by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because lossy and lossless formats fill different niches.

    2. Re:is storage that big of an issue anymore? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most of my music is 320kbps so I do like better bitrates but a 20mb VBR mp3 or ogg file does not sound that much different than a 40mb FLAC file of the same song. If you are using a hard-drive based player, however, then the number of disk reads is directly proportional to your disk rate, and your battery life is inversely proportional.
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  2. Everyone's thinking this ... by iknowcss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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  3. i'm not a fan of microsoft but... by someone1234 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
  4. Hardware prices are the real issue by ZachPruckowski · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. AAC is the most likely winner by TedTodorov · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:AAC is the most likely winner by swilver · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I strongly suspect AAC has already caught up to MP3 in popularity.
      Reality check needed here, AAC has nowhere near the penetration of MP3 just because iTunes uses it as a default. People were ripping CD's and playing MP3's long before iTunes even existed (I think I started in 1995 or so), building HUGE collections of MP3's which were shared by the harddisk load (because downloading an MP3 over the internet still took like 15 minutes using a 56k modem). Even now I hardly encounter AAC's (unless they're encoded into an AVI stream).

      As for the story that MP3 infringes on some patents, well it has no impact on how I will use my music. I also seriously doubt AAC will be patent free (or any other audio compression format for that matter), it's just that MP3 is popular right now and it's a nice big target.

  6. Why sue Microsoft? by BobPaul · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?