[icecast] Ogg doesn't measure up?!

[Ross Levis]

Sorry for the crosspost but I think it's important.
Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, posted this yesterday.
 
"We've considered heavily which direction seems most appropriate for the
second generation audio codec of SHOUTcast. Our primary goal in the
decision process was to provide smaller consumption of bits while
maintaining similar quality and compatibility with existing playback
systems. At the same time, the open nature of Ogg was very compelling,
and established the baseline of acceptance regarding cost of encoding
systems (free to the end user.) Also of significance was the extent
which other applications would be able to play back the audio,
including our most popular players (Winamp, iTunes, and RealPlayer,
respectively.)
In the end, Ogg didn't measure up as our best candidate. We still
think Ogg is a worthwhile codec, and as such SHOUTcast-streamable
support for it is available via NSV.
While I can't yet announce the precise codec we'll be using for the
next 3 year run, I will say it is making me very happy to see 56kbps
streams outperforming (from a purely subjective "quality" analysis)
current 128kbps streams, and the cost of the encoding seems manageable
enough for AOLTW to continue absorbing encoding and decoding costs, not
to mention the majority of playback devices and applications will be
supporting the codec as well by 2004, if not already."
------------------------

Perhaps we need to convince Tom otherwise.  It is likely to be AAC or 
WMA they are going with.  Once they change codecs from MP3, it is 
unlikely they will want to change again.

Ross.

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