Beyond MP3 - A Format War?

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:07:05 EST

The possibility of a VHS verses Beta like format war may bebrewing, in the arena of HD Audio.

Mark Hachman of PCMAG.com does agreat (abet brief) issue with the original MP3 format. The beauty of the MP3HDformat is the ability to work with the MP3 equipment we have now, even if wedon't exactly love it.

The author makes several interestingpoints in one paragraph. With:

"One open question: royalty rates.Thomson charges 75 cents per PC software decoder, and between $2.50 and $5.00for each codec; a hardware decoder is 75 cents, while Thomson charges $1.25 fora hardware codec. (The MP3 licensingpage also contains rates for the MP3PRO format, an even more compressedversion of MP3 that has since fallen out of favor.)"

The 1^st thing thatreminds me of can be stated in the memory of another battle. IBM Micro Channelverses EISA. Unless Thomson does some discounting, it smells like the royaltyrates for Micro Channel. The market wasn't going to pay those rates so EISA wasdeveloped. The war continued until PCI from Intel.

The 2^nd thing that comesup in my mind is we don't need a theoretical competing standard for a war. Wealready got MPEG Surround which has been out for more than a year www.iis.fraunhofer.de .

Some other noble attempts are outthere like TS9 from Korea.OK. They competed in the standards process and didn't make it. While I favor anopen marketplace, I would be careful of purchasing any MP3 audio content at ahigher price just because it is MP3HD.

Unless the electronics' folks getbehind new decoder licensing, you will only get regular MP3 performance fromthe extra cash you burned. I don't see it happening at the list prices for the licensing.

The decision will be made by you,the buyer. And history has shown if a format war is on, the decision to not buyanything unless really needed, is the decision.

TRCB.com RSS Feed

Beyond MP3 - A Format War?