[Flac-dev] FLAC as part of the Ogg project?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 02:34:37PM +0100, Steve Lhomme wrote:

> I agree, but the idea behind the OGG formats is to build patent free 
> codecs. Is FLAC really patent-free ?

This is in fact one of the goals of the FLAC project.  From
flac.sourceforge.net:

"Free" means that the specification of the stream format is in the public
domain (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification
and certify compliance), and that **neither the FLAC format nor any of the
implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any patent**. It also
means that the source for libFLAC is available under the LGPL and the
sources for flac and the plugins are available under the GPL.

(emphasis added)

> And does the OGG team agree to include FLAC in their specs ?

As I understand it, the current Ogg/FLAC implementation simply wraps the Ogg
bitstream format around a normal FLAC stream, thus not utilizing the
features of Ogg, and duplicating various bookkeeping data.  If the Ogg folks
were to spec out a FLAC-based codec for Ogg, it would likely look different
from the current implementation.

-- 
 - mdz