I remember the intense discussion in the 00s about the necessity of encoding music in the .ogg format because it was free. Of course, that format didn’t work with my iPod, so it was kind of moot for a teenager who wanted to fall asleep listening to Coldplay.
The iPod supported AAC (MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Codec) and, because the iTunes Music Store distributed music in AAC (even after it went DRM-free), pretty much every player I’ve seen in the last 15+ years has been able to decode AAC. AAC gives better quality for the same bitrate as MP3 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3).
AAC was introduced 27 years ago, so any relevant patents expired long ago.
The article seems to be implying (without citation and without saying it clearly) that the patents expired recently but every other source I can find (as well as my own memory) says that it happened a long time ago: 2007 in Europe and 2015 or 2017 for the US depending on which patents you count as relevant.
It was. MP3 patents expired ages ago, it’s now 33 years old. Vorbis was really important twenty years ago, when MP3 and AAC patents were still valid. Before Vorbis, there was no good unencumbered way of sharing compressed audio. Now there are a few very good CODECs tuned for different data rates (including some the use less bandwidth than a GSM phone, for much better quality). The value of them has dropped because, unless you’re in a very resource-constrained environment, there’s ample storage capacity and bandwidth for lossless compression.
Importantly, audio has not grown in size as video has. CD audio is very close to the limits of human hearing (and above it for most people). Even uncompressed CD audio is pretty small now, in comparison to modern storage. When I got my first computer with a CD drive, it had a GB of hard disk space. A single CD took most of the disk uncompressed. Now, 1 TB SSDs are common and you could fit a lot of people’s music collection uncompressed in a corner of their phone’s storage. The main reason to want more than CD quality is if you’re doing mixing and need to be able to lose some quality along the way when you resample.
Video quality was not there. I don’t really notice the difference above 1080p but some people do for 4K (I do for a small number of scene types, but not most video). 4K HDR is a much higher raw data rate than DVDs and so there has needed to be an improvement in video CODEC quality. Even there, H.264 is 22 years old and so all of the patents should have expired and it’s perfectly adequate for most things.
Honestly the difference between 320kbit/s and 256kbit/s is so tiny that I always prefer 320kbit/s MP3 when I have the chance. It works everywhere and sounds at least as good as 256kbit/s AAC
According to Wikipedia, the last baseline AAC patent expires in 2028 and the last patent for extensions expires in 2031. So we’re still ways off from AAC being a safe format from a patent perspective.
Since the format was first introduced 1997 some version of it has to have become patent-free 20 years later in the US, like david_chisnall said upthread. That is, whatever patent expires 2028 must be for some technique that 1997 AAC was able to exist without.
I think it is worth noting MP3, like JPEG and gzip, remains Fine – I like Tim Terriberry’s quip that JPEG was “alien technology from the future” – and if something makes an alternative less convenient or otherwise attractive, we’re not suffering by using the old thing; we can handle a few extra bits. (Insert my recurring rant here about how this makes JPEG XL’s JPEG1 recompression a Good Idea, Really!)
Vorbis is an ancient relic, just like MP3, but with worse support. Opus is the standard audio codec for almost everything and supported by almost everything precisely because it is the best lossy audio codec currently in existence.
This doesn’t seem entirely honest: https://caniuse.com/opus – something that’s not supported by ~30% of phones can’t exactly be said to be supported by “almost everything” can it?
https://caniuse.com/ogg-vorbis and vorbis is supported actress the board & is in a lot of portable DAPs from the last 10 years (with Opus supported in many now too). Sometimes you seed curmudgeons to move on if the newer format offers clear wins—especially in quality & file size.
An odd piece, because either people knew about MP3 not being free in the first place (then they probably heard about it going free) or people didn’t knew it in the first place because it just worked[tm] on all platforms.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example) or never cared anyway - the streamers.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example)
I mean, I still buy CDs and rip them, but storage got very cheap in the last couple of decades, so I rip them as perfect FLACs* and then when I’m mobile I get whatever Plex wants to give me, which is probably more modern than MP3.
* I don’t think it matters much and I certainly can’t hear the difference between lossless and good-quality lossy compression, but it makes me feel better knowing that I have copies with no generational loss.
Yeah, I like FLAC solely because I have the space for it. Half the time I’m listening over Bluetooth in my car, anyways, so it’s not like it sounds perfect, but I have the space so I’m not going to bother with mp3
Is there any generational loss in MP3 beyond the first generation? I’m not sure but I thought that lossy digital compression meant that the encoder had choices but the playback engine didn’t.
You can copy the bits of the MP3 without loss as much as you like, so in that respect no, not really. But if you want to convert it to any other lossy format (including MP3 with different settings, although some other lossy formats can do quality reduction without re-encoding) then there is. So IMO it’s best to keep the lossless version around unless you’re completely certain you will never want your music in a different format.
I was in the same group as the author: I knew it was non-free and have needed to download a separate encoder from time to time; while also not even noticing that it had changed. I guess the news went past me :)
I guess my criticism was with the “loaded” headline, because it does not match my bubble - neither the nerds nor the non-nerds. Maybe I should have clarified that of course I can imagine some people knowing it was non-free and not knowing it’s been free for a while
I wrote an app 20 years(!) ago that had to load ffmpeg as a plug-in because of MP3 encumberment. I of course knew the patents would expire someday but didn’t know it had occurred.
At the nudging of some friends who I share my albums with, I actually rip FLAC and MP3 now - but for me mp3 is fine, it’s what I put on my mobile. But of course I listen to FLAC, when I have it. Just feels like a waste of disk space to me :P
This is what I do, I rip to FLAC and Opus (at just 96 kbps, it sounds great!) using cyanrip and it really is the best of both worlds. Opus for my phone and other constrained devices, FLAC on my home network and for times when I want to reencode an album to some other format.
I’m confused… Does it matter? AFAIK, formats like Vorbis and Opus always had smaller file size for a higher quality than the MP3, and have always been royalty-free.
Only is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. MP3 was and is ubiquitous. Every other format has friction. That matters a lot when you’re talking about a huge audience where most of the users are non-techies and don’t know anything about these formats.
I know my car system understands MP3. My Roku player understands it. Pretty much any device that plays music from files understands it. Any other format is questionable. Most devices may support this or that, but it’s a question mark.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Does it matter? Kinda, I think. We’re going to have MP3s around as long as I’m alive, probably longer. Whether it remains (or currently is) the most popular way for encoding music / audio - there’s so much encoded in MP3 (and only MP3) that having playback functionality for it without having to convert it to another format (and thus lose some sound quality) is important.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Opus is widely used in real time streaming applications. It and Vorbis are the only audio formats allowed in WebM, so if you ever see a WebM file, it’s almost certainly Opus. Most on the time on Youtube, audio is Opus. So I would say that a lot of people are listening to Opus encoded audio when they use the web.
You can also look at the AAC vs MP3 battle another way. When file storage became cheap enough and home internet connection speed became fast enough to make FLAC storage as convenient as MP3, it also made MP3 a reasonable alternative to AAC.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
TIL. I didn’t know that MP3 has native support in most browser. Last time I checked (a long time ago apparently) Firefox was only natively supporting royalty-free open formats, MP3 support depended on the codecs installed on the OS. I see that it’s now built-in Firefox. My bad. I guess that’s good news :)
In terms of use, if you count WebM which uses Opus for its audio track, Opus definitely has to be ahead in terms of usage. (This is my gut-feeling with no statistical data)
As the link you provided shows, an <audio ... opus> element doesn’t work in Safari, or any browser on iOS.
Like it or not, but there are enough iPhone/iPad users that you can’t really ignore that, and mp3 works totally fine on all browsers, including those on iOS, so it looks like opus still has bad support.
Audio elements let you have multiple sources so you don’t have to choose. You can save your bandwidth & your users’ bandwidth by also storing/serving Opus files for modern systems while also keeping a legacy format like MP3s for a legacy OS like iOS.
You are confusing container formats with audio formats. The link you are citing has footnotes clarifying this. The OGG container format is not widely supported, but WEBM is. Every mainstream browser supports opus in webm, including iOS Safari (this is what YouTube uses, among others). The caniuse website shows an estimate of total global user support in browsers, which is about 97%.
In this case it’s a distinction without a difference. Sure, I can use opus in a video container, but we’re talking about audio, and you can’t use the opus codec in safari irrelevant of the container.
For example, this site has an audio element like this at the bottom:
It’s .opus not .ogg, and safari obviously has an .opus decoder for webm, but it still doesn’t play on iOS because it’s not a container problem, it’s that iOS is intentionally not supporting the codec for audio.
Some history: in the early 2000’s, when proprietary audio formats ruled the earth, two competing open-source general-purpose multi-media container formats gained popularity: “Ogg” and “Matroska”. One of them (Ogg) saw some success in open-source software and some hardware, but never gained traction on the web. The other (Matroska) won the favor of browser makers including Google who standardized a subset of Matroska called WebM.
The website you linked contains an Ogg file, so it’s not going to work broadly across web browsers since Ogg is not a popular cross-browser format the way WebM is.
What if you swapped the Ogg container for a WebM container (without touching the opus audio stream within)? Here you go:
Legacy systems. There are still plenty of car head units and similar devices that can play MP3 and nothing else (maybe WMA) from a CD or USB stick. It’s nice to know you can encode audio for those situations using completely free software. Of course that’s been true for a long time now, but not everyone follows patent expiration closely. And for the home user, I don’t know if there was ever a legitimate legal concern with installing the necessary freeworld packages in your distro of choice.
I have a small/cheap Chinese digital audio player from 4 or 5 years ago & it supports Vorbis + Opus on a proprietary Linux OS. Folks still use dedicated device, but those devices support all sort of lossy/lossless codecs.
So many comments here about the minutia of the MP3 format! Nobody seems to have understood, or wants to engage with, the deeper point of the article:
This is part of a broader trend where the cloud has replaced local storage for many users. We stream music and movies instead of downloading them. We work on Google Docs instead of saving Word files to our desktop. Files, for the general population, are becoming an invisible concept.
I get that mobile and web apps have de-emphasized and obfuscated some basic concepts, but… is this really true? Scary if so. I’m not part of that “general population”, and starting to wonder whether I even know anybody in there.
I’m not either, but I’ve noticed more and more of my acquaintances are, as time goes by. The trend may be exaggerated in size in articles like this, but it is a real one nevertheless.
I was setting up a self hosted music streaming server with some software called Navidrome recently and I vaguely noticed MP3 patents had expired. Like the article mentions it’s not really relevant anymore.
The neatest thing I came across was that the app Symphonium on my android phone has a setting to stream FLAC over wifi then switch to opus over cellular data, and the server will happily transcode my flac library when doing this. Still not a mp3 in sight.
First, you get the problem of incremental patents. The original system is free, but did you use some idea now commonplace in your implementation? Use the GPU for an adaptive “hiss” filter, or maybe a hack you read about a decade ago to speed up encoding? There may, or may not, be a patent covering it that is still in force. Maybe. In that uncertainty, a troll will appear once you build a bridge between industry players.
The only widespread open standards to avoid these issues are either insanely old or rely on technology deliberately put forward for public use. For example, QR codes are covered by an issued patent to an auto parts distributor. The owner of the patent then explictily disclaimed the patent for the public good. If a troll wants to claim they actually patented it, they must start with the claim the original patent should never have been issued.
This is nice news for games, I flipped my game over from stb_vorbis to dr_mp3 for non-looping sounds and audio init got a bit over twice as fast.
Opus is a no go because the opus build script alone is 15% of dr_mp3’s code size, the API is a complete turd, opus doesn’t seem to be supported out of the box in Audacity, and libopus isn’t actually enough and you need to deal with libogg which has the same build/API problems again…
I remember the intense discussion in the 00s about the necessity of encoding music in the
.oggformat because it was free. Of course, that format didn’t work with my iPod, so it was kind of moot for a teenager who wanted to fall asleep listening to Coldplay.Time sure fly…
The iPod supported AAC (MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Codec) and, because the iTunes Music Store distributed music in AAC (even after it went DRM-free), pretty much every player I’ve seen in the last 15+ years has been able to decode AAC. AAC gives better quality for the same bitrate as MP3 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3).
AAC was introduced 27 years ago, so any relevant patents expired long ago.
Why wasn’t that true for MP3?
It is true of MP3!
The article seems to be implying (without citation and without saying it clearly) that the patents expired recently but every other source I can find (as well as my own memory) says that it happened a long time ago: 2007 in Europe and 2015 or 2017 for the US depending on which patents you count as relevant.
It was. MP3 patents expired ages ago, it’s now 33 years old. Vorbis was really important twenty years ago, when MP3 and AAC patents were still valid. Before Vorbis, there was no good unencumbered way of sharing compressed audio. Now there are a few very good CODECs tuned for different data rates (including some the use less bandwidth than a GSM phone, for much better quality). The value of them has dropped because, unless you’re in a very resource-constrained environment, there’s ample storage capacity and bandwidth for lossless compression.
Importantly, audio has not grown in size as video has. CD audio is very close to the limits of human hearing (and above it for most people). Even uncompressed CD audio is pretty small now, in comparison to modern storage. When I got my first computer with a CD drive, it had a GB of hard disk space. A single CD took most of the disk uncompressed. Now, 1 TB SSDs are common and you could fit a lot of people’s music collection uncompressed in a corner of their phone’s storage. The main reason to want more than CD quality is if you’re doing mixing and need to be able to lose some quality along the way when you resample.
Video quality was not there. I don’t really notice the difference above 1080p but some people do for 4K (I do for a small number of scene types, but not most video). 4K HDR is a much higher raw data rate than DVDs and so there has needed to be an improvement in video CODEC quality. Even there, H.264 is 22 years old and so all of the patents should have expired and it’s perfectly adequate for most things.
Honestly the difference between 320kbit/s and 256kbit/s is so tiny that I always prefer 320kbit/s MP3 when I have the chance. It works everywhere and sounds at least as good as 256kbit/s AAC
According to Wikipedia, the last baseline AAC patent expires in 2028 and the last patent for extensions expires in 2031. So we’re still ways off from AAC being a safe format from a patent perspective.
Since the format was first introduced 1997 some version of it has to have become patent-free 20 years later in the US, like david_chisnall said upthread. That is, whatever patent expires 2028 must be for some technique that 1997 AAC was able to exist without.
I think it is worth noting MP3, like JPEG and gzip, remains Fine – I like Tim Terriberry’s quip that JPEG was “alien technology from the future” – and if something makes an alternative less convenient or otherwise attractive, we’re not suffering by using the old thing; we can handle a few extra bits. (Insert my recurring rant here about how this makes JPEG XL’s JPEG1 recompression a Good Idea, Really!)
But why not use 128 opus which also sounds just as good and saves space?
Everything supports MP3, lots of things don’t support OGG.
Also I’m confused about the choice between OGG Vorbis and OGG Opus, but MP3 is MP3
Vorbis is an ancient relic, just like MP3, but with worse support. Opus is the standard audio codec for almost everything and supported by almost everything precisely because it is the best lossy audio codec currently in existence.
This doesn’t seem entirely honest: https://caniuse.com/opus – something that’s not supported by ~30% of phones can’t exactly be said to be supported by “almost everything” can it?
Compare to MP3: https://caniuse.com/mp3
That says it’s supported in WebM.
Yes, which is great if you have a video which uses Vorbis or Opus for its audio, but not so great if what you want is to play audio.
WebM is a generic media container and is usable for non-video use cases. An audio only webm works just fine in an
<audio>element, including on iOS.I didn’t know that. I’ll add it to the pile of information that might’ve been useful to know if just using MP3 everywhere wasn’t an option.
https://caniuse.com/ogg-vorbis and vorbis is supported actress the board & is in a lot of portable DAPs from the last 10 years (with Opus supported in many now too). Sometimes you seed curmudgeons to move on if the newer format offers clear wins—especially in quality & file size.
Looks like Vorbis is just as unsupported as Opus, so I don’t understand why one would choose it in favor of MP3
The main drawback of ogg vorbis , in my opinion, is the container format’s limited metadata support.
An odd piece, because either people knew about MP3 not being free in the first place (then they probably heard about it going free) or people didn’t knew it in the first place because it just worked[tm] on all platforms.
Enough people still use mp3 (those of us who still buy CDs and rip them for example) or never cared anyway - the streamers.
I mean, I still buy CDs and rip them, but storage got very cheap in the last couple of decades, so I rip them as perfect FLACs* and then when I’m mobile I get whatever Plex wants to give me, which is probably more modern than MP3.
* I don’t think it matters much and I certainly can’t hear the difference between lossless and good-quality lossy compression, but it makes me feel better knowing that I have copies with no generational loss.
Yeah, I like FLAC solely because I have the space for it. Half the time I’m listening over Bluetooth in my car, anyways, so it’s not like it sounds perfect, but I have the space so I’m not going to bother with mp3
Is there any generational loss in MP3 beyond the first generation? I’m not sure but I thought that lossy digital compression meant that the encoder had choices but the playback engine didn’t.
You can copy the bits of the MP3 without loss as much as you like, so in that respect no, not really. But if you want to convert it to any other lossy format (including MP3 with different settings, although some other lossy formats can do quality reduction without re-encoding) then there is. So IMO it’s best to keep the lossless version around unless you’re completely certain you will never want your music in a different format.
I was in the same group as the author: I knew it was non-free and have needed to download a separate encoder from time to time; while also not even noticing that it had changed. I guess the news went past me :)
I guess my criticism was with the “loaded” headline, because it does not match my bubble - neither the nerds nor the non-nerds. Maybe I should have clarified that of course I can imagine some people knowing it was non-free and not knowing it’s been free for a while
I wrote an app 20 years(!) ago that had to load ffmpeg as a plug-in because of MP3 encumberment. I of course knew the patents would expire someday but didn’t know it had occurred.
Surely you’re not still ripping CDs to MP3? 😱
When opus and flac (or even lesser but still better) formats have been well established for so long …
At the nudging of some friends who I share my albums with, I actually rip FLAC and MP3 now - but for me mp3 is fine, it’s what I put on my mobile. But of course I listen to FLAC, when I have it. Just feels like a waste of disk space to me :P
Opus will save you even more disk space :)
This is what I do, I rip to FLAC and Opus (at just 96 kbps, it sounds great!) using cyanrip and it really is the best of both worlds. Opus for my phone and other constrained devices, FLAC on my home network and for times when I want to reencode an album to some other format.
I’m confused… Does it matter? AFAIK, formats like Vorbis and Opus always had smaller file size for a higher quality than the MP3, and have always been royalty-free.
They only suffered from bad support. However, as “MP3 players” got replaced by smartphones, supports for these better and royalty-free formats became more and more wide-spread. Heck… Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.
What am I missing here?
“They only suffered from bad support.”
Only is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. MP3 was and is ubiquitous. Every other format has friction. That matters a lot when you’re talking about a huge audience where most of the users are non-techies and don’t know anything about these formats.
I know my car system understands MP3. My Roku player understands it. Pretty much any device that plays music from files understands it. Any other format is questionable. Most devices may support this or that, but it’s a question mark.
“Today, Opus is the de-facto standard format for audio in web browsers.”
Not sure what that graph is supposed to prove. When you say “de-facto standard format” – MP3 seems to have 97.74% support, Opus has 97.16% support … but browser support in the audio tag does not translate to ubiquity of use, does it? Are people primarily encoding and listening to content in Opus, or is it simply widely implemented and ready for use if people choose to do so?
Does it matter? Kinda, I think. We’re going to have MP3s around as long as I’m alive, probably longer. Whether it remains (or currently is) the most popular way for encoding music / audio - there’s so much encoded in MP3 (and only MP3) that having playback functionality for it without having to convert it to another format (and thus lose some sound quality) is important.
Opus is widely used in real time streaming applications. It and Vorbis are the only audio formats allowed in WebM, so if you ever see a WebM file, it’s almost certainly Opus. Most on the time on Youtube, audio is Opus. So I would say that a lot of people are listening to Opus encoded audio when they use the web.
You can also look at the AAC vs MP3 battle another way. When file storage became cheap enough and home internet connection speed became fast enough to make FLAC storage as convenient as MP3, it also made MP3 a reasonable alternative to AAC.
TIL. I didn’t know that MP3 has native support in most browser. Last time I checked (a long time ago apparently) Firefox was only natively supporting royalty-free open formats, MP3 support depended on the codecs installed on the OS. I see that it’s now built-in Firefox. My bad. I guess that’s good news :)
In terms of use, if you count WebM which uses Opus for its audio track, Opus definitely has to be ahead in terms of usage. (This is my gut-feeling with no statistical data)
IIRC, Spotify and YouTube both heavily use Opus so Opus support in browsers is absolutely being used frequently
EDIT: I was mistaken, Spotify still uses Vorbis
As the link you provided shows, an
<audio ... opus>element doesn’t work in Safari, or any browser on iOS.Like it or not, but there are enough iPhone/iPad users that you can’t really ignore that, and mp3 works totally fine on all browsers, including those on iOS, so it looks like opus still has bad support.
Audio elements let you have multiple sources so you don’t have to choose. You can save your bandwidth & your users’ bandwidth by also storing/serving Opus files for modern systems while also keeping a legacy format like MP3s for a legacy OS like iOS.
You are confusing container formats with audio formats. The link you are citing has footnotes clarifying this. The OGG container format is not widely supported, but WEBM is. Every mainstream browser supports opus in webm, including iOS Safari (this is what YouTube uses, among others). The caniuse website shows an estimate of total global user support in browsers, which is about 97%.
In this case it’s a distinction without a difference. Sure, I can use opus in a video container, but we’re talking about audio, and you can’t use the opus codec in safari irrelevant of the container.
For example, this site has an audio element like this at the bottom:
It’s
.opusnot.ogg, and safari obviously has an.opusdecoder for webm, but it still doesn’t play on iOS because it’s not a container problem, it’s that iOS is intentionally not supporting the codec for audio.Oh, but the distinction is critical!
Some history: in the early 2000’s, when proprietary audio formats ruled the earth, two competing open-source general-purpose multi-media container formats gained popularity: “Ogg” and “Matroska”. One of them (Ogg) saw some success in open-source software and some hardware, but never gained traction on the web. The other (Matroska) won the favor of browser makers including Google who standardized a subset of Matroska called WebM.
The website you linked contains an Ogg file, so it’s not going to work broadly across web browsers since Ogg is not a popular cross-browser format the way WebM is.
What if you swapped the Ogg container for a WebM container (without touching the opus audio stream within)? Here you go:
https://tstearns.com/tmp/opus.html
That audio tag with opus audio works just fine in Safari on iOS and macOS. For a matrix of html audio tag compatibilty, you can reference this wikipedia chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_audio#Supported_audio_coding_formats
Thank you for correcting my misconception and summarizing the history so cleanly, appreciated!
Legacy systems. There are still plenty of car head units and similar devices that can play MP3 and nothing else (maybe WMA) from a CD or USB stick. It’s nice to know you can encode audio for those situations using completely free software. Of course that’s been true for a long time now, but not everyone follows patent expiration closely. And for the home user, I don’t know if there was ever a legitimate legal concern with installing the necessary freeworld packages in your distro of choice.
I have a small/cheap Chinese digital audio player from 4 or 5 years ago & it supports Vorbis + Opus on a proprietary Linux OS. Folks still use dedicated device, but those devices support all sort of lossy/lossless codecs.
So many comments here about the minutia of the MP3 format! Nobody seems to have understood, or wants to engage with, the deeper point of the article:
I get that mobile and web apps have de-emphasized and obfuscated some basic concepts, but… is this really true? Scary if so. I’m not part of that “general population”, and starting to wonder whether I even know anybody in there.
I’m not either, but I’ve noticed more and more of my acquaintances are, as time goes by. The trend may be exaggerated in size in articles like this, but it is a real one nevertheless.
I was setting up a self hosted music streaming server with some software called Navidrome recently and I vaguely noticed MP3 patents had expired. Like the article mentions it’s not really relevant anymore.
The neatest thing I came across was that the app Symphonium on my android phone has a setting to stream FLAC over wifi then switch to opus over cellular data, and the server will happily transcode my flac library when doing this. Still not a mp3 in sight.
Maybe.
First, you get the problem of incremental patents. The original system is free, but did you use some idea now commonplace in your implementation? Use the GPU for an adaptive “hiss” filter, or maybe a hack you read about a decade ago to speed up encoding? There may, or may not, be a patent covering it that is still in force. Maybe. In that uncertainty, a troll will appear once you build a bridge between industry players.
The only widespread open standards to avoid these issues are either insanely old or rely on technology deliberately put forward for public use. For example, QR codes are covered by an issued patent to an auto parts distributor. The owner of the patent then explictily disclaimed the patent for the public good. If a troll wants to claim they actually patented it, they must start with the claim the original patent should never have been issued.
Also: GIF (and LZW) patents expired in 2004
This is nice news for games, I flipped my game over from stb_vorbis to dr_mp3 for non-looping sounds and audio init got a bit over twice as fast.
Opus is a no go because the opus build script alone is 15% of dr_mp3’s code size, the API is a complete turd, opus doesn’t seem to be supported out of the box in Audacity, and libopus isn’t actually enough and you need to deal with libogg which has the same build/API problems again…