MP3's Loss, Open Source's Gain

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @09:13AM 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."

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Re:is storage that big of an issue anymore? by CRCulver · 2007-02-27 09:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because lossy and lossless formats fill different niches.
AAC is the most likely winner by TedTodorov · 2007-02-27 09:37 · 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.