I live on the south coast of the UK, and we've got a new high speed passenger ship that does the run over to france.
The current one will do 50 knots unlaiden and fully fueled, and the one they've got on order will cruise at 55 knots with a top speed of 70 unlaiden. Admittedly its only passengers + cars and the odd truck, but it sure beats the 15 knot ferries!
So FhG/Thomson have released a new codec, based on mp3, which they claim gives twice the compression (but probably only does about 1.5x). The guys behind LAME think that if they were to make some changes that weren't allowed by the original spec (just like FhG have done), then within 120 hours of coding they could make big improvements, probably up to the 1.5 mark. What stops them is that existing players wouldn't play it
It is impossible for a 64kbps mp3pro stream to sound like 64kbps to an old player and 128kbps to a new one in the manner they've described. If they ofload large amounts of processing onto the player, the having a 64kbps stream sound like 48kbps on a mp3 player and 128kbps on mp3pro then that I can just about accept
So, why would we want to move from mp3 to mp3pro? The quality improvement isn't that great - vorbis will be able to match that by about release 2, and vorbis is patent free GPL / LGPL and will soon support subtitles and video! mp3pro will be at least as patented and needing licencing as mp3 (don't forgot that lots of companies are now being asked for mp3 royalties from FhG, who haven't gone after royalties for a few years), and quite possibly more. So, when you're in that boat you've also got to consider real audio and media player as serious contenders (they're cheaper than mp3pro is likely to be based on mp3, and sound nearly as good), while Vorbis shines out.
Finally we've got the player issue. You can get an mp3 player for almost every platform out there. Realplayer and media player run on very few, and look at dvds! Are we really gonna see players for linux, bsd, os2, beos?
Yeah, we're going to see some mp3pro, but I don't think it'll oust mp3 just like that, and I really think vorbis is the one to watch. (Vorbis is at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/)
The article makes the good point that the open source / hacker community don't want DeCSS to pirate, only to watch their DVDs on Linux. However, its DeCSS for 'doze that could be the problem. Using the windows version and some easy to download tools, "script kiddies" and their contemporaries can easily re-encode dvds to lower bandwidths & other codecs, say to put them onto one or two cds, or post a 180kbit version to the web. Its these sort of people who are giving a bad name to the DeCss lot, and whos actions are only going to increase, which is a shame for those of us who use it for its oringinal use.
The main thing with the CSS encoding, DMCA etc is that the laws exist in the US. Those of us in the EU (and elsewhere) are not actually affected by them (despite attempts from the MPAA to the contrary), and the European Court will back us up on this if it were taken to them (look up the NAS vs IBM case from the 70s if you are not sure).
What we need is those of us from outside the US to write an open source, Linux DVD player, and host it in the EU. If we find a site that understands the legal issues, and won't be scared off by a letter from a US lawyer, then we can watch DVDs on an open source player. Our US friends can break DMCA if they want by downloading it and using it (much like we can break US export laws when we downloaded PGP until a few months back).
For a first release, take DeCss and an open source MPEG player, splice them together and roll. We can add in the extra functionality later.
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I live on the south coast of the UK, and we've got a new high speed passenger ship that does the run over to france.
The current one will do 50 knots unlaiden and fully fueled, and the one they've got on order will cruise at 55 knots with a top speed of 70 unlaiden. Admittedly its only passengers + cars and the odd truck, but it sure beats the 15 knot ferries!
So FhG/Thomson have released a new codec, based on mp3, which they claim gives twice the compression (but probably only does about 1.5x). The guys behind LAME think that if they were to make some changes that weren't allowed by the original spec (just like FhG have done), then within 120 hours of coding they could make big improvements, probably up to the 1.5 mark. What stops them is that existing players wouldn't play it
It is impossible for a 64kbps mp3pro stream to sound like 64kbps to an old player and 128kbps to a new one in the manner they've described. If they ofload large amounts of processing onto the player, the having a 64kbps stream sound like 48kbps on a mp3 player and 128kbps on mp3pro then that I can just about accept
So, why would we want to move from mp3 to mp3pro? The quality improvement isn't that great - vorbis will be able to match that by about release 2, and vorbis is patent free GPL / LGPL and will soon support subtitles and video! mp3pro will be at least as patented and needing licencing as mp3 (don't forgot that lots of companies are now being asked for mp3 royalties from FhG, who haven't gone after royalties for a few years), and quite possibly more. So, when you're in that boat you've also got to consider real audio and media player as serious contenders (they're cheaper than mp3pro is likely to be based on mp3, and sound nearly as good), while Vorbis shines out.
Finally we've got the player issue. You can get an mp3 player for almost every platform out there. Realplayer and media player run on very few, and look at dvds! Are we really gonna see players for linux, bsd, os2, beos?
Yeah, we're going to see some mp3pro, but I don't think it'll oust mp3 just like that, and I really think vorbis is the one to watch. (Vorbis is at http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/)
The article makes the good point that the open source / hacker community don't want DeCSS to pirate, only to watch their DVDs on Linux. However, its DeCSS for 'doze that could be the problem. Using the windows version and some easy to download tools, "script kiddies" and their contemporaries can easily re-encode dvds to lower bandwidths & other codecs, say to put them onto one or two cds, or post a 180kbit version to the web. Its these sort of people who are giving a bad name to the DeCss lot, and whos actions are only going to increase, which is a shame for those of us who use it for its oringinal use.
What we need is those of us from outside the US to write an open source, Linux DVD player, and host it in the EU. If we find a site that understands the legal issues, and won't be scared off by a letter from a US lawyer, then we can watch DVDs on an open source player. Our US friends can break DMCA if they want by downloading it and using it (much like we can break US export laws when we downloaded PGP until a few months back).
For a first release, take DeCss and an open source MPEG player, splice them together and roll. We can add in the extra functionality later.