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

[Max Horn]

>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.

Actually, the Frauenhoffer Institute has developed the whole MP3 
encding system. And encoders like Vorbis/Org all build on the ground 
work done by the Frauenhoffer Institute.

I don't want to start a flame war, but IMHO the MP3/Org/Vorbis etc. 
way of encoding data is not well understood by 99.9% of the people 
talking about it (I don't mean any of you, just speaking in general). 
E.g. I often meet disbelieve when I tell ppl that different encoders, 
all producing MP3 at the same bitrate, with same/similiar settings, 
nevertheless do *not* necesarilly produce same results. In fact, the 
quality widely differs, so does the speed of the encoding process. 
That is because the "psycho acustic models" used by the encoders are 
interchangeable; and it's these psycho acustic models that make a 
encoder good or bad. Thes P.A.M. have to be created in tedious and 
expensive tests with hundreds of test listeners etc. This is not 
something a normal small group of open source authors can do, you 
need *money* for that, for the equipment etc.

I wonder what Vorbis does in this area... I'll investigate that.


Hm, this was slightly off-topic, sorry, but I couldn't resist :-)


Max/Fingolfin
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Max "The Black Fingolfin" Horn
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