[LINK] File formats and licencing

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Kim Davies wrote:
> Quoting Alastair Rankine on Wednesday April 11, 2007:
> | Gruber posted a followup (http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/ 
> | wee_bit_more_on_aac) which postulates a reason why Ogg Vorbis and  
> | friends are not widely deployed: the device manufacturers believe  
> | that these are likely to be patent infringing.
> 
> Beyond that is the high computational cost associated with Ogg Vorbis.
> Without specialised hardware specific to Ogg Vorbis, encoding and
> decoding of it on portable devices results in appreciably shorter
> battery life.
> 
After playing with Ogg/Vorbis/Theora formats, I tried to check out an
MP3 PODCAST at the NLA and was suprised by the size of the files and
disappointed I was not able to actually listen to the item. Seemed to me
there is very little or no compression in MP3 - which could explain the
computational difference. Not to mention the bandwidth requirements.

Investigating a USB DVB-T dongle, it seems that MPEG2 (basis of DVB and
DVDVIDEO) is sometimes hardware and sometimes software....I am still
hoping it is in hardware on the device I am playing with as MPEG2 
licensing is problematic  on Linux/Open source.

Another interesting aside is the Broadcast standards. It seems the card
I am looking at works in Australia and China - where mobility is part of
the DVB-T standard. I suspect there is a linux driver,  software and
portable devices but I need to learn to read Chinese to find it.

Guess the question is whether MPEG4 will go the way of JPEG.

Jan, picking up on your posting of a few days ago.
<http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2007-April/073130.html>
  I came across a snippet which indicates that there isn't a universally
accepted captioning standard for DVB and presumeably DVD. Europe's is
different to the UK. Not sure where Australia Fits. And the US is no
doubt different again.

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
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