What does it mean that MP3 is free?
idiallo.com
idiallo.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645
More notable is that many H.264 patents are expiring this year:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
“MP3 is now free. It was free seven years ago, but it is now too.”
> To fulfill the goal of being royalty free, the development process requires that no feature can be adopted before it has been confirmed independently by two separate parties to not infringe on patents of competing companies.
> [...] technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity (i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigation). As a defensive condition, anyone engaging in patent litigation loses the right to the patents of all patent holders.
> As an additional protection for the royalty-free status of AV1, the Alliance has a legal defense fund to aid smaller Alliance members or AV1 licensees in the event they are sued for alleged patent infringement.
MPEG-LA tries to create FUD around this by lumping all H.264 patents into one big pool and never clarifying which edition of the standard a patent applies to. The end result is that anyone not already ignoring MPEG-LA's patents is unlikely to start until _all_ of the patents in MPEG-LA's H.264 pool have expired which is still several years out.
As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.
I started using RockBox around 2005/2006, but it still wasn't worth converting my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis from MP3. Right around that time, my vehicle stereo could suddenly support MP3/WMA files, and I could burn multiple albums to a CD for my truck stereo. MP3 had the broadest support across devices, and basically become an industry standard, even with the licensing.
MP3 was popular enough that most mobile devices were able to decode them via hardware, while OGG and FLAC where playable though software decoding but at the cost of using more battery.
Then WMP would play ogg, though you'd probably have switched to MPC and Winamp.
The "Og" in Ogg was a reference to "Orion ship G" in the game Netrek (https://www.netrek.org/) so definitely not Klingon :)
(Nettrek was a star trek themed online space combat game featuring Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Orion as the playable factions)
To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).
By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.
But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.
Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.
“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.
Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.
I am at the beginning stages of looking elsewhere, because of some very poor choices made that disregarded my advice. I have extreme impostor syndrome because I have only helped juniors, but have never worked in a professional capacity with anyone that had more knowledge than myself. That isn't a flex, I wish I had mentors in a professional environment, but I never did. I have learned a ton on my own, and have worked with others that moved on to better careers. I was around at the beginning stages of the company, and have gained a lot of freedom like taking time off to watch my son when he's sick, or if I need to see a doctor. I have built on top of CMS software (Umbraco/.NET) and have figured out how to keep resources below what is recommended, and love what I do, but am being given the "opportunity" and direction from the President to leave the company because my salary can't be covered any longer. Not meant to tell a sob story, just genuinely looking for advice on finding something that will strike my interest and I can contribute to. I have been with this company for almost 18 years, and built it from nothing with a weird technology, into something that a lot of medical, insurance, banking, and law firms depend on.
Any advice is truly appreciated, as I was taken by surprise, but also know that I can achieve far more than what I currently practice. I spend late nights learning for fun, even at 45 years old.
For large companies (Google, Apple, ...), other patents are useful defensively and as part of a war chest/patent portfolio.
For startups and inventors, they're probably OK but unlikely to prevent someone with deep pockets from eating your lunch and/or suing you to oblivion. The important defensive strategy is to be aware of related patents, though some are absurdly broad.
Execution usually matters more than ideas.
The format plays on nearly every device that plays any kind of music ever made, files are tiny, and they sound amazing still.
It's so much different than like 480i videos from old VHS and DV tape imports from the MP3 era.
I also still rip audio CDs, but I don't compress with anything that isn't lossless. Hard drive space is super cheap nowadays, and FLAC is even supported natively in my browser.
I've heard Opus is a better bang-for-buck for the size to quality ratio, but I haven't tried it yet.
I can play an MP3 anywhere that music files are played. I still can't do that with FLAC.
I know that FLAC is perfect, and that MP3 is lossy, and that such lossy formats have generational loss in re-encodes.
But I can either manage multiple overlapping collections of digital music and a conversion system, or I can manage a single collection and skip a lot of that inconvenience.
I chose simplicity.
There are so many devices that support mp3. My 15 year old car plays CDs with hundreds of mp3s with zero issues. I still have somewhere a mobile CD mp3 player that will work with both new files and those I harvested 20 years ago.
There is surprisingly still some mp3 releases online, including content for kids which for me was mp3 only so far.
I have a lot of FLACs but with years it makes more and more sense to me to keep it unified.
https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/consumer-electronics...
Especially in podcasts where it's just voice the savings in storage and traffic are significant. My own listening preference is 32kbits opus at ~1/4th size of the original 128kbits mp3.
32 is more than enough for books/podcasts, 96 is more than enough for music. I doubt above-96 makes much sense for OPUS - I'd use FLAC if I needed better quality.
But of course, if people weren't habituated to this bogus conception of obsolescence, how on earth would Microsoft manage to sell them a word processor for $179.00?
You'd think so, but somehow this doesn't stop Jellyfin from choking whenever it starts streaming a FLAC.
With no actual knowledge, I speculate that they don't bother starting to decode the upcoming track until the current track has already finished.
That's a bizarre statement regardless. Most streaming services that use AAC are 256 kbps, same as most MP3 downloads. Spotify's paid tier is supposedly 320 kbps MP3. Tidal free-with-ads is only 160 kbps AAC.
Since FLAC boils down to a mix of verbatim subframes and linear predictive coding (specifically, polynomials with warmup samples or Rice coding), non-verbatim subframes are variable-length, and the samples for a given interval of time may even span between two blocks. It's a tricky problem, but doable, and FLAC implementations IME (libflac, libavcodec, etc.) have varying levels of accuracy when seeking without a seektable.
I assume the choking described depends largely on the medium of transport (e.g. HTTP servers without support for Range headers makes streaming practically impossible), followed by some delay to "guess" the correct block to jump to then figure out which frames contain samples closest to the requested timestamp.
I do have pretty fast internet (2 gigabits up and down), so maybe that's it?
I didn't succeed. This might be for any of a few reasons:
- I've updated Jellyfin between then and now.
- I'm using a LAN connection instead of a transoceanic connection.
- I might be doing something subtly different than what I was doing before. This is pure speculation.
Sure it wasn't obvious, but a quick search should have revealed that?
AAC (including HE-AAC variants) support is also a universal option, having been included in devices since ~2010.
As I understand it, all AAC-LC and HE-AACv1 patents have expired.
AAC-LC goes much further back. iPod was introduced in 2001. Practically all devices in 2003 already supports AAC-LC when the format was introduced in 1997.
Because MP3 software encoder or decoder has always been free for personal use.
> because the MP3 format was proprietary.
MP3 is not proprietary. But I guess the word proprietary has different meaning in the modern day communication. Just like patents free.
AAC-LC, baseline version of AAC, has been declared patent free by Redhat in 2017.
Other than not having a true open source top quality AAC-LC encoder, ( most people just use the best one from iTunes but not open source ). There are very little reason to use MP3 today. AAC-LC was introduced in 1997, iPod was introduced in 2001, Nearly all hardware since 2003 has had AAC-LC support.
Of course people may prefer to use Opus. But unless you want low bitrate, I would argue the small bitrate saving at 160Kbps+ is not worth the backward compatibility offered by AAC-LC. Or simply go lossless.
Last weekend I've tried to do the same without a computer and basically you can only use players like VLC which only allowed me to load single file (playlists are there, but again you have to connect to computer).
Edit: Just tried one more time and you can place files into VLC folder (using Files is a bit tedious tho) and they appear in VLC player. Yay.
With ios you need a Mac and you are stuck with the 'Photos' app and or otherwise it's some ugly abstraction with weird year_month_day directories all over the place.
Yes, I’m aware of the work around using GarageBand for iOS.
Edit: Just tried one more time and you can place files into VLC folder (using Files is a bit tedious tho) and they appear in VLC player. Yay.
This is like, the understatement of the week, a single Xbox one game can now be 140GB
I told him that when I was his age it would have taken until next Thursday (it was a Wednesday) and there was a really long pause while it seemed like he was processing the idea of waiting for something.
Seems the license came quite cheap anyways.