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Vorbis doesn't have hardware support on many chipsets which means that battery life would not be as good as for MP3/AAC. I find it quite hard to see Apple as ev

Vorbis doesn't have hardware support on many chipsets which means that battery life would not be as good as for MP3/AAC. I find it quite hard to see Apple as evil for implementing International Standards and while they are not free (or Free software compatible) they are open. There are plenty of good reasons for not adding support to additional codecs without good reason to. 1) Different (and confusing) compatibility depending on the exact model of your product. 2) Need to keep support indefinitely otherwise you cut off previously supported content in people's libraries. People get far more annoyed when you take something away that if you never enabled it. 3) If you have Apple's scale and people will encode to your format anyway a narrow minimal range of formats supported will reduce debugging and handling of edge cases and file types. Free codecs are a niche concern, almost all users get them [edit: by "them" I meant AAC/AVC/MPEG4] free from their OS provider and in the trickier cases like Linux there are plenty of sources for open source codecs that you can obtain as packages for nearly every distro. AFAIK there has never been any legal action to try to prevent these packages being distributed. So in practice using Free codecs is an ideological decision in most cases and very few people care (I used to but I got over it, the AVC and AAC licenses really aren't that bad if you read them).

shmerl 13y ago
Adding Vorbis in hardware is not hard. The reason it's not usually added is because of Apple precisely, since they are one of the major manufacturers of hardware players. I.e. if they'd add support for Vorbis, it will become widespread pretty soon. So your argument is reversed. And, in mobile SoCs it is gaining traction now, because of Google and WebM. Hardware players are a bigger problem. 1) There is nothing confusing about codecs support. Just specify what's supported. Sansa players list supported codecs which include Vorbis and FLAC for example. 2) So what? Keep it as much as you want. What's the problem with that? 3) Barring newer and better codecs from adoption because of "debugging burden" is just ridiculous. > Free codecs are a niche concern, almost all users get them free from their OS provider So, how do OS X or iOS users get it from Apple? They don't. And that's the reason why HTML5 audio and video is such a mess. Apple know perfectly that they cause it, and they don't care, because they are jerks.
- gibwell 13y ago
  Android has the larger market share. If it were just a matter Apple being jerks, all the open goodness you want would be widely available. But it isn't that simple.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Android doesn't affect media players directly. Also, even with biggest market share, as far as someone with smaller but still significant market share sabotages codecs adoption - there is a problem. Only if Apple will become completely irrelevant as in "can be ignored", then it won't affect the situation. But so far it didn't happen yet. Surely Apple aren't alone in causing these kind of problems, but they are a major factor. They managed to sabotage open codecs for audio and video tags in W3C, but now there is some hope that WebRTC will make open codecs part of the standard, and Apple will be forced either to follow the standard or admit they are jerks.
- josephlord 13y ago
  1) So Apple add Vorbis in the iPhone 6 and iPod fifth generation. "Why does this work on his iPod and not mine?" 2) For the iPhone 8 a new super low power, low cost chip with better integration of audio output becomes available but doesn't support Vorbis. Nevermind we will just use the old expensive high power chip instead. Every feature you add is a limitation on the future changes you can make. 3) Not always. Just a new encoder that does something differently can work on one player and not others, then you have to work out whether it is an encoder bug or decoder bug. I meant almost all users get AAC/AVC/MPEG4 from their OS provider or Linux users can install open source (although probably not patent licensed) AAC/AVC/MPEG4 codecs from various locations. I wasn't clear and I will re-edit for clarity.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    1) So? Instead of breaking your head on "how and where do I get a player which supports the codec I need", you'll worry about "which of these from the same manufacturer supports the codec I need". I surely prefer the second case to the first. 2) Why doesn't it support Vorbis? Let them make it low power low cost and add support for all modern codecs. It's doable. Apple sabotages it not because of any technical reasons. Also, modern SoCs allow optimal decoding of any custom codec potentially, by allowing it to be defined programmatically, even if hardwired decoder is not available. See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEON_%28instruction_set%29#NEON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEON_%28instruction_set%29#NEO... * http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php?tab=Why+NEON http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.... 3) Let them debug it. Or they shouldn't make players if they can't support modern codecs because it's "hard to debug". It's not about what users or developers and publishers can do. It's about what they can't (because of Apple). And what people can't do is using open codecs without worrying that some users won't be able to access them.

shmerl 13y ago

Adding Vorbis in hardware is not hard. The reason it's not usually added is because of Apple precisely, since they are one of the major manufacturers of hardware players. I.e. if they'd add support for Vorbis, it will become widespread pretty soon. So your argument is reversed. And, in mobile SoCs it is gaining traction now, because of Google and WebM. Hardware players are a bigger problem. 1) There is nothing confusing about codecs support. Just specify what's supported. Sansa players list supported codecs which include Vorbis and FLAC for example. 2) So what? Keep it as much as you want. What's the problem with that? 3) Barring newer and better codecs from adoption because of "debugging burden" is just ridiculous. > Free codecs are a niche concern, almost all users get them free from their OS provider So, how do OS X or iOS users get it from Apple? They don't. And that's the reason why HTML5 audio and video is such a mess. Apple know perfectly that they cause it, and they don't care, because they are jerks.

gibwell 13y ago
Android has the larger market share. If it were just a matter Apple being jerks, all the open goodness you want would be widely available. But it isn't that simple.
- shmerl 13y ago
  Android doesn't affect media players directly. Also, even with biggest market share, as far as someone with smaller but still significant market share sabotages codecs adoption - there is a problem. Only if Apple will become completely irrelevant as in "can be ignored", then it won't affect the situation. But so far it didn't happen yet. Surely Apple aren't alone in causing these kind of problems, but they are a major factor. They managed to sabotage open codecs for audio and video tags in W3C, but now there is some hope that WebRTC will make open codecs part of the standard, and Apple will be forced either to follow the standard or admit they are jerks.
josephlord 13y ago
1) So Apple add Vorbis in the iPhone 6 and iPod fifth generation. "Why does this work on his iPod and not mine?" 2) For the iPhone 8 a new super low power, low cost chip with better integration of audio output becomes available but doesn't support Vorbis. Nevermind we will just use the old expensive high power chip instead. Every feature you add is a limitation on the future changes you can make. 3) Not always. Just a new encoder that does something differently can work on one player and not others, then you have to work out whether it is an encoder bug or decoder bug. I meant almost all users get AAC/AVC/MPEG4 from their OS provider or Linux users can install open source (although probably not patent licensed) AAC/AVC/MPEG4 codecs from various locations. I wasn't clear and I will re-edit for clarity.
- shmerl 13y ago
  1) So? Instead of breaking your head on "how and where do I get a player which supports the codec I need", you'll worry about "which of these from the same manufacturer supports the codec I need". I surely prefer the second case to the first. 2) Why doesn't it support Vorbis? Let them make it low power low cost and add support for all modern codecs. It's doable. Apple sabotages it not because of any technical reasons. Also, modern SoCs allow optimal decoding of any custom codec potentially, by allowing it to be defined programmatically, even if hardwired decoder is not available. See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEON_%28instruction_set%29#NEON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEON_%28instruction_set%29#NEO... * http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php?tab=Why+NEON http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.... 3) Let them debug it. Or they shouldn't make players if they can't support modern codecs because it's "hard to debug". It's not about what users or developers and publishers can do. It's about what they can't (because of Apple). And what people can't do is using open codecs without worrying that some users won't be able to access them.