AAC Licensors
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As Marco noted[2] news orgs took that original announcement and twisted it into a "creators announce MP3 is dead" story, presumably because there are more clicks to be had there than a story about patent expirations.
[1] https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi...
How about - "MP3 music tech finally freed from license limitations"
I'm afraid I don't.
> mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated
This gives the impression that the patents are valid but will no longer be available for licensing, and you can't buy licensing rights to build your mp3 player - in reality, the patents expired, making them free.
> ...there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today
Assert that mp3 is dead today
> However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3
Reiterate that mp3 is dead today
I'm not surprised that the media took this as "mp3 is dead" and ran with it. The blame lies as much with Fraunhofer for their misleading statements as with the rest of the media.
<strikethrough>The real WTF is how readily news organisations will just print a press release put out by Fraunhofer saying "MP3 is dead".</strikethrough>
One can see plainly from this thread how bad an effect polemical titles have on discussions.
The harder task would be to get an ASIC that accelerates decoding. Know of any?
And yes, the industry is stupid in standardizing in proprietary formats
Audio decoding is really not a challenging task nowadays in my experience, when your average "embedded" processor runs at hundreds of MHz. There's still power consumption to factor in but that's never really been a limiting factor for me in the past decade at least. Maybe I've just been spoiled with powerful SoCs.
They do of course deliberate sabotage open codec efforts.
The arguments people make for more "advanced" codecs are mostly completely spurious especially now that MP3 is patent-free. I'm probably just crazy though, after all I still use wired internet whenever possible. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Unless you know what you're doing (have to use the Ogg container and a .ogg extension and use Android >= 6.0), you can't fill an Android device with Opus files and play them back like you can AAC or MP3. I don't believe you can play them back at all on iOS. Mobile devices also often have a hardware codec that allows them to save on battery somewhat, when playing other codecs.
Plus desktop support is limited. Browsers support it but widespread desktop apps like iTunes generally don't.
Fraunhofer promoted MP3 as “dead”, because they get money from AAC patentsA better title would have been:
"MP3 promoted as "dead", Fraunhofer will get money from AAC patents now"
There is no proof that Fraunhofer did what they did because they are also a licensor of AAC.
Of course Fraunhofer would frame it this way, but when tech blog writers don't even understand what patents are, it's pretty sad.
MP3 became irrelevant the second Apple made AAC the premier codec for iPods and the iTunes Store back in 2003. And given that it was the dominant player/store combination for the following decade it's not hard to see why AAC became popular. The fact AAC sounded so much better was just the cherry.
MP3 officially became dead when everyone moved to streaming.
But don't villify Fraunhofer over this — as a public nonprofit research institute, they're expected to finance their research with patent licenses.
If you want to be angry at someone, look at all the for-profit entities on that list, who absolutely have no need to collect AAC license fees, as they've got more than enough profit, but still do.
In fact, I'm also a bit disappointed that Google entered this fight with VP8 and VP9 — with their free products it means that only companies with already large budgets will be able to create such standards in the future, and research institutes will be unable to do so, giving even more power to companies. I'd prefer a world where such standards are designed by impartial nonprofit research institutes. A similar issue exists with the WHATWG standards, which are dominated by Google, Apple and Microsoft, which is part of why we now have EME.
Though they are not really a shining example of frugality either. Another institute they merged with was locally known as the "institute for lunch and business trips" (GMD[1], Gesellschaft fuer Mittagessen und Dienstreisen).
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMD-Forschungszentrum_Informat...
Why they cannot be funded 100% with public money? At least the "public" would get some free technology back.
This model is to ensure Fraunhofer only develops technology that has practical applications (for more theoretical research, there's other research societies).
Also, if it was free, it'd be the German taxpayer subsidizing foreign companies — that wouldn't work in the long term, as German taxes would pay for tech that Google f.e. would use, but Google wouldn't give anything back.
One could make the license fees tax deductible in Germany, though, that would be a good solution.
And this decision was done intentionally.
There's also research societies that work without any income (Max Planck, Leibniz, Helmholtz), but the whole point of the Fraunhofer society is to take science and turn it into something that companies can apply, use, and would pay for.