[JDEV] [Fwd: Cool idea! (Jabphone ;-)]

[Steve Kennedy]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 11:22:32PM -0500, Appleweed wrote:

> And, I agree to what someone said earlier... Vorbis is the way to go for 
> the codec. Once again, it is free and open source (I think). The Frauhoffer 
> (sp?) codec is the most widely used and, suddenly realizing this, 
> Frauhoffer has decided to implement a transactional licensing fee to 
> *every* streamed and downloaded MP3. So nice of them...

There are several "free" codecs (gsm is usable I think).
MP3 has ALWAYS been licensable, both for encoding and decoding, just
most people have ignored it. Frauhoffer is just the company that has
agreed to collect license fees for the MPEG consortium (group ?) that
did the original work.

The Xing decoder is free (see www.freeamp.org). I think the decoders
can be used freely in non-commercial (or charged for) applications.
Encoders may also be free if the application isn't charged for.
The fees are actually quite high, something like $1-2 per decoder,
and double that for an encoder.

Steve

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