MP3 Format Still Gathering Momentum 417
PoliTech sends us over to Billboard.com for a detailed article about the coming tipping point in the music business in favor of MP3. The two biggest drivers pushing Warner and Sony BMG toward MP3 are an upcoming massive Amazon-Pepsi download giveaway and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart (according to sources): "...Wal-Mart [alerted] Warner Music Group and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format."
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:4, Interesting)
Just make players that work. (Score:2, Interesting)
So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.
It costs nothing to add ogg decoders to hardware. Unlike mp3, ogg is patent, license and royalty free. My PDA does ogg and so does my better portable player. It's just software and this is not a technical problem, it's a monopoly problem [theregister.co.uk].
Re:How Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune [wikipedia.org] (not to mention Windows Mobile....)
3. The faad and faac are illegal in the US - try http://www.audiocoding.com/ [audiocoding.com] - source is there, not binaries (see Wiki, again) and then also try to tell me what is the issue? Are you trying to suggest that there is nothing available for free on Linux / other that plays AAC files - legally? How about VLC? The world doesn't begin and end at the FSF - although the FSF is really, really fab, it's not the world. If anything in media playback is the word, it's VLC - but that's just me.....
Otherwise, your idea of Walmart dropping WMA because it is proprietary and won't play on iPods is probably quite true - I think that was the insightful part.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Go back and re-read my post.
No, there is nothing that MS can do to keep you from adding WMA support to your commercial radio/TV/stereo running Linux. You can easily download the codecs from Hungary or wherever, add them to your box, and sell it. As I said, there is nothing technical that MS can do to keep WMAs (non DRMed ones) from playing on your Linux machine.
Of course, you can probably expect to get sued, but I wasn't addressing legal aspects. This was clear in my prior post.
For those of us just using Linux at home, and not selling devices running it, legal issues aren't very important. MS isn't sending the BSA around to peoples' houses checking their home computers for proper licensing. They can do this for businesses, but most businesses probably have no business reason to play WMAs at work. Everything is different when you start selling stuff, however. For instance, you could include Ogg support on your Linux-running systems, and you can be sued for patent infringement. Sure, the common wisdom is that Ogg isn't patent-encumbered, but are you sure of that? Have you paid a patent attorney to do an exhaustive patent search and make sure that's the case? The term "submarine patent" exists for a reason. Heck, you could be sued for patent infringement even if there is no infringement; if you don't have the money to mount a legal defense, you'll have to just capitulate.
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:4, Interesting)
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests [hydrogenaudio.org] wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances. Really the only surprise in the past few years of listening tests is haw amazing the guys at LAME are at adding life to MP3.
Re:DRM, ogg, CDs, fair use, licenses (Score:5, Interesting)
Use MP2 instead. Backwards compatibility is inherent. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 files as well. And at bitrates of 160kbps+ (Joint Stereo, psy-1) MP2 actually sounds better than any MP3 as well. Not to mention it both encodes and decodes faster.
In fact I'd put MP2 up against DD/AC3/A52 any day. Dolby has a history of bribing organizations to NOT include MP2 along-side AC3, such as the US DVD and HDTV standard. In the rest of the world, patent-free MP2 is allowed on DVDs and in digital TV, in addition to AC3.
You're just about completely wrong.
Flash video 7 used a slightly modified h.263 codec. Non-standard, I must admit, but it was very quickly reverse engineered. Not only can anything based on libavcodec play flash videos, but the open source Flash player/plugin GNASH can play them as well, even though it's still developing, and quite buggy at the moment.
Flash 9 added On2's proprietary VP6 codec, but use of that format has been quite limited.
And what's the audio codec with both of them? Plain old MP3.
Plus, Adobe long ago announced the shift to completely standard video formats. The recent beta versions of the Flash9 plugin can play MP4 files with h.264 and AAC audio. All 100% open standard, and interchangeable with Quicktime, MPlayer, etc.
Flash was opened up before Java was, and there are numerous 3rd party implementations of Flash. Gnash is even open source, and can handle many of the common Flash videos found in the wild.
VLC has French devs - no software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this because I specifically asked on their developer mailing list; I'd like to support AAC in my own application Ogg Frog [oggfrog.com], but I can't, because I live in the US.
While there's been no enforcement action so far, it's my understanding that it's illegal for Americans to even download VLC, let alone use it.
Re:I'm still a little skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
This raises an interesting question: given that photons are, according to the string theory, strings, and that light is composed of photons, can the wavelength of light be made arbitrarily small ? And if not, does that mean that there is an upper bound to the amount of energy a single photon can carry ?
Coming to think of it, wouldn't Planck's width have the same effect ?
For that matter, if the universe has a limited size, then there is a lower bound to the energy of a single photon: it's wavelength can't be larger than the entire universe, because it wouldn't fit into it if it was. Does this also mean that a large enough black hole can't emit Hawking's radiation, because the photons would need to have a larger wavelength than can fit into the universe ?
Re:I'm still a little skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)