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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
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.
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)
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.
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?
www.rockbox.org
Howtos are on the site.
You flash the bootloader (using a tool they provide), then extract the daily-built rar file to your iPod (which you have to have formatted and enabled for Windows USB Mass-Storage compatibility).
Then, just start copying your music to your iPod/harddrive in whatever format/directory structure you want.
AAC, MP3, FLAC, OGG, etc, all supported
You just said it twice.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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.
Out of curiosity, when does this patent expire?
*sigh* back to work...
WMA at 64kbps sounds almost exactly like MP3@128kpbs
You have my sympathy. How did you lose your hearing?
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
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
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?- 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 ]
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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