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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."
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.
Because lossy and lossless formats fill different niches.
Yeah! And what kind of name is Ogg Vorbis anyway!? ..
Stupid stupid name!
can you REALLY tell the difference between 256khz and 512khz (hint: if you say 'yes', you are lying).
If you can't then your hardware for listening sucks. Put on a set of great headphones and tell me you can't hear the noise in a 256k lossy music file created from a CD. Make a FLAC of that same file and tell me if you hear that noise.
FLAC is far superior to any lossy formats but it creates absolutely huge files and yes I do pay attention to the size of my music collection because it's all in FLAC or SHN.
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
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.
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
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.
All the double-blind tests by audiophiles at Hydrogenaudio and other sites that due true ABX testing disagree with you. For most people, most of the time, with most types of music, pretty much every modern codec is transparent well below 256kbps.
Yes, people can train themselves to listen for the specific artifacts of different codecs, but if you're not an audio engineer, why would you want to?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
You don't have to take their word for it -- take the tests yourself. Or make your own, install ABX software and see if you can tell to any statistically significant consistency when you're listening to the original CD rip vs a 320kbps MP3. You'll be in a pretty small group if you can.
It's not like this is all being done in a dark room by a cabal somewhere. Put your ego where your mouth is -- lots of people "know" that they have to have the best possible quality, and then find out the hard way that they can't tell a 128kbps AAC from a DAT master when asked to prove it in a double-blind ABX test.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Ogg Vorbis is the Xiph.org foundation's lossy format. FLAC is the Xiph.org foundation's lossless format. Clear now?
So I should buy better hardware so I can hear the noise in my MP3s?
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.
Ogg is Xiph.org foundation's streaming container format. Vorbis is Xiph.org foundation's lossy audio codec. FLAC is Xiph.org foundation's lossless audio codec. Everyone's clear now
Havoc Video
iPods can play ogg/flac files, as can any mp3 player supported by Rockbox.
http://rockbox.org
- 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 ]
The only comparison that I could possibly give here is with the GIF image standard that also had nearly identically widespread use by nearly every website, dial-up BBS, and computer lab. It was The Image Standard that all other image file formats were compared to, and several graphic image manipulators only dealt with the GIF format at all.
And then came Unisys, who instituted insane royalty policies that effectively killed the format for anybody who wanted to create software that used the format or even post GIF images on their websites. I know this first hand, because I tried to obtain a license for a software package that I wrote that would display GIF images on stadium scoreboards. Unisys was insisting on a 5% royalty for the entire system, meaning the entire scoreboard. Needless to say that other than as a demonstration to prove the software could be written (it was anyway, but not sold until the patent expired), we didn't sell the GIF codec with the stadium software. BTW, that was 5% of $20 million, which was considered insane by my supervisors for just a few stupid images that could easily be converted to other formats instead.
If you look around today on the web, the GIF format, even now that the patent has expired, is largely a minor file format and its use is largely fading still. Jpeg files largely took over the slack, although file formats like PNG and others did come up to help take up the slack from GIF as well.
In this situation, it is up to those stakeholders of the MP3 file format to see just how far they will try to milk their patents and attempt to extort those companies who have published MP3 players. If the royalties are modest and they use their head (like not going after FLOSS developers), you may be right that the MP3 file format is so entrenched that there will not be any other file format. But if they get a case of greed and stupidity, it will mean the death of the file format.