[vorbis] Winamp5

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

From: "Tom Felker" <tcfelker at mtco.com>
> > No, I don't have specific links.
>
> For those interested, I'm guessing you're talking about this:
>
> <http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1154927#post1154927>
> <http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1155766#post1155766>
> <http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1161037#post1161037>
> <http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1165047#post1165047>

<p>Some of those messages do indeed look familiar, so you probably did find the
right areas.

> <http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?postid=1145687#post1145687>
>
> This link speculates that their AAC license excludes other codecs in some
way.

I hadn't seen that one.

> I don't think this is real reason, but it could be a complication - many
> proprietary codecs perpetuate themselves with funny licenses like that.

Somehow I doubt it.  I think if it was that simple, they would be willing to
say up front why they weren't including vorbis encoding.  And they are
including the LAME mp3 encoder.

And other companies (Nero, Apple, etc.) include AAC encoders along with
others.

Oh, and as for where they say:

***
And Nullsoft is not going to say anything about this. It is pretty likely
that they have been paid to encode to AAC only. Notice how AAC is available,
but MP3 requires a registration fee? They could do the same for Vorbis, but
since the Vorbis part is GPL they couldn't stop their users from
distributing the registered plugin
***

They are including LAME compiler in the paid version.  They get around the
part where the GPL would allow it to be distributed by distributing the
unmodified official LAME dll.  Instead, they use a seperate DLL that gets
called that does the registration check and then calls the lame.dll.  That
way people can distribute the lame DLL encoder all they want (just like is
already done) without any conflict with their code and without giving away
free MP3 encoding, etc.  The same could be done with Vorbis if they wanted
to.

And they allow WAV 'encoding', so they can't be having an exclusive AAC
contract. True, wav isn't much of an 'encoder', but still...

So I don't think that theory holds up well.

> And I don't think it's likely the encoder is encumbered and the decoder
isn't.
> Possible, yes.  But it seems to me (IANAL) that any patent specifically
about

Well, I remember that has been mentioned before.  I think for both mpc and
Vorbis encoders.  That certain things are done a specific (non-optimal) way
because doing it in a more natural or traditional way might infringe upon
some patents.

(I don't want to go look through their source code to find the spots.  It's
not too important anyway, because....)

An encoder is far more complex than a decoder, so there are a lot more
opportunities for things be infringing.  By comparison, a decoder is
relatively simple.

For example, let's say that during the encoding process, a large number of
items had to be sorted.  And let's say that every sorting method other than
the 'bubble sort' method was patented.  Quicksort, heapsort, etc. etc. would
all be unavalable, so the programmers would have to use the slow bubble sort
method and hope the n^2 growth didn't cause a problem.

The decoder deals with data that is already properly arranged by the
encoder, so it isn't effected.  Only the encoder would be.

> audio codecs would describe the entire process, not just one half.  So my
> guess is that eventually AOL's lawyers will say OK, and others will see
this
> as a vote of confidence.

That's my guess.  My hope, anyway.  And that they'll include it in the free
version.

Vorbis isn't perfect.  High cpu usage, lower battery life in portables, and
so on, but I'd much rather see it become widely used rather than WMA.

We are just going to have to wait and see, I guess.

<p>P.S.   Glad you were interested enough to go hunt up those links...

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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