First of all ...
In reply to:
See, Fraunhofer-IIT isn't really knocking down anyone's doors saying "all your mp3 are belong to us."
That's exactly what they are doing in true Microsoft style.
Taken from
http://www.8hz.com/mp3/
We have received an email from Fraunhofer (as have more developers) to negotiate the licensing for the mp3 encoder. As we are poor students, paying the license is not really a viable option :/
Because of this, we have decided to shut down the 8hz-mp3 section and stop the development of the 8hz-mp3 encoder until further notice.
When we receive a reply from Fraunhofer we'll let you know what will happen further...
Sounds pretty darned agressive to me.
Call it what you want Fraunhofer-IIT waited for optimimum market penetration (what a dirty word) of their MP3 standard (and yes it is theirs, no arguing from me there) and then said : now it's time to milk the money cow. Same thing MS did with MS-Dos and Windows, same thing they did with Wordperfect (and now have done again it seems with wordperfect for linux), same thing that was tried with the GIF standard (and we all know what happend there). I personally think this kind of money making is unfair. If they had distributed it commercially from day one (evals and trial installs excluded) I would have not even blinked but you can be sure that MP3 wouldn't have been as big as it is now.
As for Ogg being better or worse, my desire for a choice is not moved by sound quality of MP3 or Ogg. It is moved only by my disapprovement of what is happening with MP3 and licensing (both the MP3 standard and the drive for Digital Rights Management).
In reply to:
And.. wait a minute, the OGG implementation for ARM is COMMERCIAL?? That doesn't sound right to me.. Kind of defeats the purpose of switching to a "royalty free" format
You take the words right out of my mouth there. I should point out we are just talking about the source code for the decoder/encoder here, not some form of DRM. The rewrite from floating point (the open source Ogg releases) to integer is not free. I too would have preferred it to be open source. After all, not just the Empeg would be using something like this but also a few dozen PDA's could for example in conjunction with a Linux distro for PDA's. The most popular example being the iPAQ which is being linuxified left and right.
Cheers,
Hans
Mk2 - Blue & Red - 080000431
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