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Red Hat Announces Fedora Will Support MP3 Playback (fedoraproject.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader jrincayc shares news from Red Hat's Fedora Engineering Manager, Tom Callaway. On the Fedora-legal mailing list, Callaway announced:
Red Hat has determined that it is now acceptable for Fedora to include MP3 decoding functionality (not specific to any implementation, or binding by any unseen agreement). Encoding functionality is not permitted at this time.
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
Fedora users are gonna party likes its 1999!
No it doesn't. There was a patent on mp3 decoding and still one on encoding. Red hat not wanting to be sued by Fraunhofer opted out of paying royalties. Everyone using mpg123, xmms, etc have wilfully ignored this law because really how would a university sue every user? They don't they sue distributors. That is why Be Inc , Microsoft, apple, Ubuntu etc all pay royalties.
The patents have expired, now it can be included without violating the law
Indeed we do, but consider that reencoding files in vorbis and opus makes them subject to generational loss, and you'll still need an mp3 decoder for that. Plus, you'll lose the ability to share it with other people, because they won't be able to play back the file, or wonder what the ".opus" file extension is.
Its sad, but if you show this headline to random non technical people, and explained to them that fedora was an OS like windows or mac os, they will think that fedora couldn't play back audio files before.
Take a wild guess.
The MP3 format that we know today came to light in 1995 with the finalization of MPEG-2 layer 3. AS for actual implementation, the first reference implementation was at the end of 1994, and the first player somewhere in 1995.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
s/the first reference implementation was at the end of 1994/the first encoder reference implementation was at the end of 1994
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
I am just wondering why this "big wishlist item" has taken this long. Anyone?
I'm sure it's an issue for some, but given how cheap and small storage is today compared to 20 years ago, it's becoming a non-issue in that you don't need mp3 or other lossy compressions anymore. A CD-sized album is generally less than 700 MB uncompressed, or around half of that compressed. With tiny affordable USB keys and SD cards now being in the 128 GB range, and hard drives in the 4 TB range, MP3 and other lossy encodings are no longer as vital.
Back when a memory stick was 256 MB and a typical HD 20-40 GB, things were quite different.
I quite frankly think many rip to MP3 out of old habit, not because they need it.
Remember h.264 is NOT free, Sony et al just are not enforcing the patent yet
This type of shit really holds Linux back from the mainstream
Even my debian has mp3 playback.
MP3's started out as MPEG1 Layer 3. When the MPEG2 Layer 3 spec was finalized, there was some stuff that made it back into the MPEG1 Layer 3 spec.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I dumped ripping to MP3 years ago, I use FLAC. Only reason to use MP3 is because most car stereos are dumb that they can't use FLAC or PCM-WAV, same reason for many pocket "MP3" players. Smart mobile phones can mostly read the formats, but their sound is dreadful.
If only online music stores would kill off MP3 for formats like FLAC.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Size and slow networking. Remember, a lot of files were shared on dial up connections. Outside of technical implementations for specific purposes, the vast majority of people's exposure to MP3 was through the use of Napster and such. This is what made it popular and with all those files in the wild there would remain a need to at least play them back.
By late 1900s, I'm assuming you meant 98-99 or later when computers commonly had storage larger than a gig or two and 1.5 meg or faster internet speeds were becoming common (although still expensive) in larger cities. I remember upgrading from a 14.4 modem to a 33.6 and bragging about the speed increases on a local BBS with an internet gateway (which eventually became one of the largest dial up services in my area). My first CDROM was larger than my hard drive (640 meg). We were trading MP3s back then- although they were mostly lectures and crap and not music which Napster popularized the format with.
They pay a royalty per device for it. Try charging a royalty per copy for something you distribute for free and see how long you'll stay in business...
I use OGG, in my 1909 Hupmobile.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In which direction?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Technically, it won't be valid in the US of Trump. It was valid *before*...
A country where people who spent years researching algorithms wanted to make a living while doing so.
However, I do agree that patents and copyrights should expire much sooner than they do..
Some posters seem to think this has been difficult for Linux/Red Hat/Fedora users. It hasn't been, the mp3 support is in third party repos that are easily added. This is simply moving it from these to a core repo. This will eventually happen with all patented things (NTFS, exfat, h264, h265 etc), just some will take a very long time. User's of other platforms should be more concerned with their lacking support for open codecs e.g flac, taking until Windows 10 or still not in iTunes. But can be added as trivially to Windows as mp3 can to Fedora.
With typical lossless FLAC compression, you need around 380 MB per hour of music. That means that with a 128 GB microSD card, you can play non-stop, 24/7 for more than two weeks without ever repeating a single song. That's not enough?
How did you ever cope back when an MP3 player held 128 MB?
Then again, nobody serious uses RedHat. It has been babylinux from its very inception...
Or back when a Walkman took one cassette, for that matter?
Ok grandpa, but wasn't it Teddy Roosevelt that popularized it?
So far as I know this is the first time that a US company has said it is okay to have open source MP3 decoding. Ubuntu for example had MP3 decoding, but used a closed source decoder from Fluendo. Up until September 2015 there were patents that prevented this from happening.
The linux way is downloading binaries from a repository.
Sure, occasionally they compile stuff, but the BSD way of pushing source trees instead of the binary dependency hells just doesnt seem attractive to Linux users for some god awful reason.
"His name was James Damore."
How many more years until Wikipedia supports MP3 ? They don't give a damn about everyone being able to use their website right now. Will it change?
They are working on it, but probably will wait until encoding is also patent free. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.... and https://phabricator.wikimedia....
moved on to what? 'selfies', social media, the 'cloud', and incomprehensible UIs?
I'd rather discuss mpeg codecs.. much more interesting.
East by north-east
also there's ogg vorbis and flac. MP3 can die in a fire.
Vorbis has been superseded by Opus.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It's another format that will survive because of its ubiquity. Unless you have one of the early Network Walkmans (or Redhat Linux, apparently), your device will support the format. Amazon et al. don't want a bunch of stores offering different music formats for different players.
And memory is cheap. You can mitigate the most immediate problems with mp3 by increasing the bitrate. Sorry. It's another legacy format that will stay around for ever because it's adequate.
Germany?
No, there was no loophole with open-source systems. I emailed Technicolor and asked and was told no. (Technicolor is responsible for the Fraunhofer patents in the US.)
this is NOT a mp3 library finally integrated ... <ironic>these are "mp3d" and "mp3ctl", integrated mp3 support in systemd, in few week we are going to finally have "journalctl --mp3" that give us journal logging in mp3 format!</ironic>
It's great that some of MP3 is out of patent but there are many more audio / video codecs which are in patent and people need. It would be nice if Fedora could curate these codecs and stick them on RPMFusion and make it easy for people to install them without effort. I doubt it would take much effort to wrap it up in a simple UI with some legal disclaimers and present it to the user when they attempt to play an affected file.
No, it's not. Not when you can trivially have access to your entire collection and don't have to predict what you will be in the mood for. Not when you can avoid having to periodically swap out what subset of music you have on your phone at any given time. Not when you can leave more room for other content.
Of course copying all that data to the phone in the first place is kind of daffy. That's what cloud storage is for. Compressed formats still make sense for cheaper, faster streaming though.
given how cheap and small storage is today compared to 20 years ago
Even if storage is cheap, cellular or satellite data transfer is still $5 to $10 per GB.
"In WHAT fucking dumb ass shit hole of a country" is Slashdot Media headquartered?
Debian is willing to put something into the non-free archive area (and things that depend on it into contrib). In fact, the existence of the non-free section on Debian servers is why the GNU project cannot recommend Debian. Fedora is more likely to instead leave out a package entirely, except for non-free firmware that executes on peripheral coprocessors instead of the main CPU. But even that's too much non-free software for GNU.
Early in my career I had some tech discussions with Tom "Spot" Callaway. Always helpful; good guy.