I don't know why this article says "now". It was over 7, almost 8 years ago that the final patents on MP3 expired. There was even HN discussion at the time:
Fedora supporting h264 OOTB will be a huge win. The current setup with mesa freeworld, rpmfusion, etc. is comically bad. Year of the linux desktop FTW.
That H.264 page is almost fantastically useful, except that I find it quite difficult to read the page and understand when the remaining US patents are due to expire. Maybe I am just too impatient!
I am hoping we could break those H.264 limits ( such as block size ) and brute force push compression higher with much higher computational requirement while still being patent free. I think with MPEG-5 EVC baseline which uses mostly expired patents shows that it is possible to reach HEVC level compression.
The situation with H.264 is complicated by the fact that it refers to a whole series of standards released over an extended period. The vast majority of H.264 videos in the wild only use the High profile which was first published in March of 2005, therefor any claim of essential patents covering these videos with an expiration date after March 2025 is dubious.
MPEG-LA tries to create FUD around this by lumping all H.264 patents into one big pool and never clarifying which edition of the standard a patent applies to. The end result is that anyone not already ignoring MPEG-LA's patents is unlikely to start until _all_ of the patents in MPEG-LA's H.264 pool have expired which is still several years out.
The reason why no one noticed is that everyone has been trivially circumnavigating the patents for decades (the usual model being a converter that doesn't come with its own lame.dll but asks you to put one into its folder) and Frauenhofer hasn't been caring much when it was private users as opposed to hardware manufacturers. If not for this, something like Ogg Vorbis would have taken its place.
As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.
I sometimes wonder if the name "ogg vorbis" hampered its uptake. MP3 is admittedly a pretty jargony name too but isn't otherwise "weird", compared to Ogg Vorbis is just Klingon-esque.
As a long time creative worker in addition to my technical work, I’ve tried in vain to explain to the FOSS crowd that names, UIs, user flows, etc a) really matter if they want anyone outside of the technical world to use their tools, and b) what other software developers think of them isn’t a good measure of those things. What Mastodon would need to have done to be a Twitter replacement for general audiences was my most recent losing battle. Lots of haughty, dismissive “federation is not that complicated” and “I think toots is a cute analog to tweet and the people who don’t like it just need to get over it.” Well, the nearly immediate mass exodus after the incredibly energetic mass adoption says everything we need to know about that.
“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.
Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.
The name didn't help, but the biggest issue was when I first encountered the format it was very difficult for me to find software that could play it. It's been a while, but IIRC Windows Media player and Realplayer didn't like it, I can't remember if WinAmp the time supported it either, I think it may have gotten it eventually?
Colloquially they were always just referred to as Oggs, which wasn't too weird to my ears.
To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).
By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.
But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.
Are patents in general even useful in tech anymore? I remember older mentors almost keeping score with how many patents they authored, now I almost never hear the word patent mentioned unless it's a patent troll going after up and coming startups with vague yet somehow legally enforceable bs that costs millions to defend
When it comes to negotiating a new job, they are absolutely not something you want to underplay. Bring it up and talk about it, and the challenges you faced creating it. I feel like being able to talk about why you created something, and the challenges you faced, along with what you learned is a huge plus. Maybe I'm more old-school with this thinking, but when it comes to someone that is more senior and can provide useful knowledge to your team, I'd want this person over someone that was talking about the latest tech, but didn't have real experience to discuss in depth. To any recruiters, am I out of touch with this thinking?
I am at the beginning stages of looking elsewhere, because of some very poor choices made that disregarded my advice. I have extreme impostor syndrome because I have only helped juniors, but have never worked in a professional capacity with anyone that had more knowledge than myself. That isn't a flex, I wish I had mentors in a professional environment, but I never did. I have learned a ton on my own, and have worked with others that moved on to better careers. I was around at the beginning stages of the company, and have gained a lot of freedom like taking time off to watch my son when he's sick, or if I need to see a doctor. I have built on top of CMS software (Umbraco/.NET) and have figured out how to keep resources below what is recommended, and love what I do, but am being given the "opportunity" and direction from the President to leave the company because my salary can't be covered any longer. Not meant to tell a sob story, just genuinely looking for advice on finding something that will strike my interest and I can contribute to. I have been with this company for almost 18 years, and built it from nothing with a weird technology, into something that a lot of medical, insurance, banking, and law firms depend on.
Any advice is truly appreciated, as I was taken by surprise, but also know that I can achieve far more than what I currently practice. I spend late nights learning for fun, even at 45 years old.
For large companies (Google, Apple, ...), other patents are useful defensively and as part of a war chest/patent portfolio.
For startups and inventors, they're probably OK but unlikely to prevent someone with deep pockets from eating your lunch and/or suing you to oblivion. The important defensive strategy is to be aware of related patents, though some are absurdly broad.
I still rip every audio CD (including audiobooks) into MP3 and I have about 8 GB of MP3 audio files in my library (a lot of children's audio books in there for the kids).
The format plays on nearly every device that plays any kind of music ever made, files are tiny, and they sound amazing still.
It's so much different than like 480i videos from old VHS and DV tape imports from the MP3 era.
I understand for Audiobooks, but why use anything outside of FLAC for music CDs in 2025? Honest question, not trying to stop you from doing what you're doing.
I also still rip audio CDs, but I don't compress with anything that isn't lossless. Hard drive space is super cheap nowadays, and FLAC is even supported natively in my browser.
I couldn't hear a problem with properly-encoded high-bitrate MP3 when my ears were much, much younger, and I still cannot do so today.
I can play an MP3 anywhere that music files are played. I still can't do that with FLAC.
I know that FLAC is perfect, and that MP3 is lossy, and that such lossy formats have generational loss in re-encodes.
But I can either manage multiple overlapping collections of digital music and a conversion system, or I can manage a single collection and skip a lot of that inconvenience.
I rip and convert to FLAC primarily for the reasons you stated, but I also have to convert to MP3 when I want to play music from an SD card on my car's head unit.
There are so many devices that support mp3. My 15 year old car plays CDs with hundreds of mp3s with zero issues. I still have somewhere a mobile CD mp3 player that will work with both new files and those I harvested 20 years ago.
There is surprisingly still some mp3 releases online, including content for kids which for me was mp3 only so far.
I have a lot of FLACs but with years it makes more and more sense to me to keep it unified.
I rip to flac and then use fileflows to convert to opus personally then syncthing to get the 50 gb of opus files to my phone. As flac my cd collection is around half a terrabyte so it only recently became possible to out the whole thing on my phone for just excessive money (grapheneos doesnt run on a phone that supports sd cards so that cheaper compromise was out for me)
I mean AAC-LC is much better option than MP3, also patent free, compressed much better, and also plays on nearly every device that plays any kind of music ever made since early 2000.
MP3 is still the standard lossy audio format. Plays on everything, patent-free. OK sound quality (some stuff falls apart even at 320 if you have golden ears).
It’s actually still a bit tedious on the Apple ecosystem. On the web (Safari) you have to wrap it in a WEBM or CAF container, and on iOS it’s similar. That’s a lossless process, but it’s still not the OPUS container
To me it seems OPUS is transparent at much lower than 120.
32 is more than enough for books/podcasts, 96 is more than enough for music. I doubt above-96 makes much sense for OPUS - I'd use FLAC if I needed better quality.
Large hard drives and fast internet do not render obsolete the principle of frequency domain compression. MP3 and JPG will probably remain in service for a very long time.
But of course, if people weren't habituated to this bogus conception of obsolescence, how on earth would Microsoft manage to sell them a word processor for $179.00?
They don't. You now subscribe to Copilot 365 or whatever the hell Office is called today for the low, low price of $12.99 per month for the rest of your life.
> Fast forward to today, and internet speeds have grown exponentially. A song in a more modern format like AAC or FLAC might be double or triple the size of an MP3, but who notices? You can stream a full album in lossless quality without buffering.
You'd think so, but somehow this doesn't stop Jellyfin from choking whenever it starts streaming a FLAC.
With no actual knowledge, I speculate that they don't bother starting to decode the upcoming track until the current track has already finished.
FLAC allows embedding a seektable but encoders rarely emit one in practice.
Since FLAC boils down to a mix of verbatim subframes and linear predictive coding (specifically, polynomials with warmup samples or Rice coding), non-verbatim subframes are variable-length, and the samples for a given interval of time may even span between two blocks. It's a tricky problem, but doable, and FLAC implementations IME (libflac, libavcodec, etc.) have varying levels of accuracy when seeking without a seektable.
I assume the choking described depends largely on the medium of transport (e.g. HTTP servers without support for Range headers makes streaming practically impossible), followed by some delay to "guess" the correct block to jump to then figure out which frames contain samples closest to the requested timestamp.
I appreciate this look into FLAC! I think MP3 is just such an industry standard at this point, which means nobody is really putting work into making streaming music better. There isn't enough of an audience to push for ever higher quality, especially since most people have moved away from stereos to computer speakers, and mostly listening through their awful cell phone speaker!
Not that long ago I got in a lovely HN argument over Why bother with the complexity of FLAC for 2X compression at best vs. the absolute stupid triviality of RIFF containing PCM? The only swaying feature was standardized metadata :P
> A song in a more modern format like AAC or FLAC might be double or triple the size of an MP3
That's a bizarre statement regardless. Most streaming services that use AAC are 256 kbps, same as most MP3 downloads. Spotify's paid tier is supposedly 320 kbps MP3. Tidal free-with-ads is only 160 kbps AAC.
I'm actually curious; I use Jellyfin to stream FLAC all the time and it doesn't seem to have any issues for me. I'm not sure what you're doing differently.
I do have pretty fast internet (2 gigabits up and down), so maybe that's it?
Not sure I'd call FLAC "more modern." There are college graduates younger than FLAC. I mean, sure, it's a decade younger than MP3, so you're technically correct, but it's not exactly the latest hot format.
I will never forget bow one of the pains of using Ubuntu was figuring out his to get my MP3s to play. It delayed my full adoption of Linux by years and led me to using Kubuntu instead, which I continue to use today.
Definitely not obvious, and at that time I wasn't even aware of many of the resources, it even how to search well. Coming from a Windows world, all I knew at the time was that something which I'd taken for granted just didn't work. The ideal was nice, but it wasn't practical.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645
More notable is that many H.264 patents are expiring this year:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
“MP3 is now free. It was free seven years ago, but it is now too.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLAe3RyMDk
MPEG-LA tries to create FUD around this by lumping all H.264 patents into one big pool and never clarifying which edition of the standard a patent applies to. The end result is that anyone not already ignoring MPEG-LA's patents is unlikely to start until _all_ of the patents in MPEG-LA's H.264 pool have expired which is still several years out.
As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.
“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.
Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.
The "Og" in Ogg was a reference to "Orion ship G" in the game Netrek (https://www.netrek.org/) so definitely not Klingon :)
(Nettrek was a star trek themed online space combat game featuring Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Orion as the playable factions)
To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).
By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.
But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.
I am at the beginning stages of looking elsewhere, because of some very poor choices made that disregarded my advice. I have extreme impostor syndrome because I have only helped juniors, but have never worked in a professional capacity with anyone that had more knowledge than myself. That isn't a flex, I wish I had mentors in a professional environment, but I never did. I have learned a ton on my own, and have worked with others that moved on to better careers. I was around at the beginning stages of the company, and have gained a lot of freedom like taking time off to watch my son when he's sick, or if I need to see a doctor. I have built on top of CMS software (Umbraco/.NET) and have figured out how to keep resources below what is recommended, and love what I do, but am being given the "opportunity" and direction from the President to leave the company because my salary can't be covered any longer. Not meant to tell a sob story, just genuinely looking for advice on finding something that will strike my interest and I can contribute to. I have been with this company for almost 18 years, and built it from nothing with a weird technology, into something that a lot of medical, insurance, banking, and law firms depend on.
Any advice is truly appreciated, as I was taken by surprise, but also know that I can achieve far more than what I currently practice. I spend late nights learning for fun, even at 45 years old.
For large companies (Google, Apple, ...), other patents are useful defensively and as part of a war chest/patent portfolio.
For startups and inventors, they're probably OK but unlikely to prevent someone with deep pockets from eating your lunch and/or suing you to oblivion. The important defensive strategy is to be aware of related patents, though some are absurdly broad.
Execution usually matters more than ideas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
The format plays on nearly every device that plays any kind of music ever made, files are tiny, and they sound amazing still.
It's so much different than like 480i videos from old VHS and DV tape imports from the MP3 era.
I also still rip audio CDs, but I don't compress with anything that isn't lossless. Hard drive space is super cheap nowadays, and FLAC is even supported natively in my browser.
I can play an MP3 anywhere that music files are played. I still can't do that with FLAC.
I know that FLAC is perfect, and that MP3 is lossy, and that such lossy formats have generational loss in re-encodes.
But I can either manage multiple overlapping collections of digital music and a conversion system, or I can manage a single collection and skip a lot of that inconvenience.
I chose simplicity.
There are so many devices that support mp3. My 15 year old car plays CDs with hundreds of mp3s with zero issues. I still have somewhere a mobile CD mp3 player that will work with both new files and those I harvested 20 years ago.
There is surprisingly still some mp3 releases online, including content for kids which for me was mp3 only so far.
I have a lot of FLACs but with years it makes more and more sense to me to keep it unified.
https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/consumer-electronics...
32 is more than enough for books/podcasts, 96 is more than enough for music. I doubt above-96 makes much sense for OPUS - I'd use FLAC if I needed better quality.
Dead Comment
But of course, if people weren't habituated to this bogus conception of obsolescence, how on earth would Microsoft manage to sell them a word processor for $179.00?
You'd think so, but somehow this doesn't stop Jellyfin from choking whenever it starts streaming a FLAC.
With no actual knowledge, I speculate that they don't bother starting to decode the upcoming track until the current track has already finished.
Since FLAC boils down to a mix of verbatim subframes and linear predictive coding (specifically, polynomials with warmup samples or Rice coding), non-verbatim subframes are variable-length, and the samples for a given interval of time may even span between two blocks. It's a tricky problem, but doable, and FLAC implementations IME (libflac, libavcodec, etc.) have varying levels of accuracy when seeking without a seektable.
I assume the choking described depends largely on the medium of transport (e.g. HTTP servers without support for Range headers makes streaming practically impossible), followed by some delay to "guess" the correct block to jump to then figure out which frames contain samples closest to the requested timestamp.
That's a bizarre statement regardless. Most streaming services that use AAC are 256 kbps, same as most MP3 downloads. Spotify's paid tier is supposedly 320 kbps MP3. Tidal free-with-ads is only 160 kbps AAC.
I do have pretty fast internet (2 gigabits up and down), so maybe that's it?
I didn't succeed. This might be for any of a few reasons:
- I've updated Jellyfin between then and now.
- I'm using a LAN connection instead of a transoceanic connection.
- I might be doing something subtly different than what I was doing before. This is pure speculation.
Sure it wasn't obvious, but a quick search should have revealed that?