2017: The last year of the MP3-Free version?

Started by abstauber, Tue 11/04/2017 12:05:00

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abstauber

I just stumbled upon this:
The basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired there by 2012 at the latest. In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 [....] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology will be patent-free in the United States on 30 December 2017 when U.S. Patent 5,703,999, held by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft[73] and administered by Technicolor,[74] expires.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues


So after this, I assume we can safely scrap the mp3 free branch.

Danvzare

Holy crap! Really! 8-0
That's awesome! :-D

No longer will we have to cower in fear from lawyers! No longer will we be forced to choose OGG over MP3! No longer will we...
Wait a minute... which is better, OGG or MP3?

Crimson Wizard

The topic title was misleading for me, I first thought they denied the use of MP3 codec for free.

Quote from: abstauber on Tue 11/04/2017 12:05:00
So after this, I assume we can safely scrap the mp3 free branch.
There is no branch, it is just a compilation option, so no big deal to support.

tzachs

Quote from: Danvzare on Tue 11/04/2017 12:45:03
Wait a minute... which is better, OGG or MP3?

Trick question, OGG is actually a container, not an audio format in itself, so you can actually store many different formats in OGG (not necessarily audio).
The common audio format for OGG, which AGS supports, is OGG Vorbis: it offers comparable performance to MP3, so there's no much difference expected in quality. However, there's a newer format, OGG Opus, which supposedly beats them both. Ogg Opus is not currently supported by AGS afaik.

m0ds

#4
I'm pretty sure more people have been to the moon than have been sued by MP3 technologies.

It was nothing short of a stupid, unenforceable thing in the first place (I'm talking the people behind 'MP3', not AGS) so about time too, really!

Snarky

They probably never went after software decoders (after all, it was in their interest to get the use of MP3 technology as widespread as possible). Where they presumably made their money was in charging licensing fees from the makers of hardware systems (mp3 players, stereos, etc.) as well as higher-end audio editing software with encoding capability like SoundForge and Cubase. I'm sure if you were Adobe and tried to sneak in MP3 support into Audition without paying up, you'd find a pretty little lawsuit in your mailbox soon enough.

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