Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Jan 2010 14:20 UTC, submitted by lemur2
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RE[2]: OSNews, Do Not Forget Audio
by TasnuArakun on Mon 1st Feb 2010 11:01
in reply to "RE: OSNews, Do Not Forget Audio"




Member since:
2009-10-04
I believe that audio is in a slightly better situation than video.
I think that, for example, the iPhone easily has the power to decode Vorbis/Speex/FLAC in software. This means that the hardware argument for video doesn't matter.
Vorbis is also very high quality, definitely better than MP3 (and Speex obviously beets them all for speech, and FLAC obviously has the best quality, but larger file sizes). This invalidates the quality argument.
I don't know about patents, but I doubt they are much of a problem for Vorbis (it is fairly well known). Also, audio codecs are quite a bit simpler than video codecs, so there are less patents on them.
This means that the only thing stopping adoption of free audio formats is online store support and player support. Both of these are political issues, rather than technical issues like with video.