According to the current top story on Slashdot right now, Thompson/Fraunhofer are going to try to start collecing licensing fees for MP3 _DE_coders of $0.75 per decoder. (here is the relevant link to the Thompson licensing page.)

Any idea how this might affect us empeg owners, particularly in terms of new beta versions???

And the obvious related question: what's the status of OGG Vorbis support in the code at the moment?

It shouldn't affect us at all. The fees for the MP3 decoder license were paid when Empeg bought the ARM decoder.

- Trevor

Since the licensing terms for mp3 technology has been the same for almost two years now, I assume the empeg guys already paid the fee,
so - in theory - nothing has changed.

Looking at this http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp it looks like sonicblue has paid; And I;m pretty sure that covers the empeg/riocar ....

Nothing to worry about.
And OGG is working quite stable,
only the quality is still slightly below mp3....

Of course we have covered all necessary license payments. There has always been a $0.75 charge for MP3 but some (mostly non commercial) applications have conveniently overlooked that.

We also paid MS for WMA.

Rob

I should add, I don't believe the licenses we paid apply to any third party software you may choose to develop or run on this hardware. That would be your problem.

Rob

There has always been a $0.75 charge for MP3

So that's why my empeg Mark II was so damn expensive!

tanstaafl.

I can needless to say this will get me on my butt to start reconding 500+ cd's into OGG

And hell, ogg sounds so good anyways ;P

*goes out and get's a couple new hard drives*

In reply to:

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There has always been a $0.75 charge for MP3 but some (mostly non commercial) applications have conveniently overlooked that.

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As i read it, free players were previously excluded from the licensing charge, but now they have changed their policy and are charging for all decoders.

Are you sure free / noncommercial software always had to pay the fee?

I remember years ago WinAMP quickly changed their decoder because they were getting hastled by Thompson/Fraunhofer for licensing fees. They simply changed to a decoder that did not use any Thompson/Fraunhofer sourcecode.

Thankfully we still have Ogg Vorbis

My understanding (and IANAL) is that Thompson Fhg chose not to persue non commercial applications for license fees. This policy may have changed but the "rules" have not.

Sound a bit like a certain graphics format?

Rob

Sound a bit like a certain graphics format?

Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing the whole time I'm reading this. SSDD.

Sounds like trying to get a genie back in a bottle...