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Topic: Open Wma Decoder (Read 5242 times) previous topic - next topic
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Open Wma Decoder

Reply #1 –
Interesting, the cat is now out of the bag and M$ cannot make any changes otherwise all the hardware WMA decoders will not work.

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #2 –
WMA 9 is totally different than 8 right? So does it support 9 as well? (my guess is not)

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #3 –
Quote
Interesting, the cat is now out of the bag and M$ cannot make any changes otherwise all the hardware WMA decoders will not work.

Don't considder the beast de-fanged/de-clawed. People have tried before. Microsoft has a glut of money and a glut of lawyers to persue any leads open to them. They have not spent so much time and money developing a monopoly on propriety to just let it go so easy. If and only if Microsoft realises the futility of their efforts might this infraction go unchallenged. After all if they can decode it then an encoder is not far away. And while this might mean real improvement to WMA Microsoft does not play well with anyone. I wish them the best. But I think there is a storm comming.

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #4 –
Quote
Don't considder the beast de-fanged/de-clawed. People have tried before. Microsoft has a glut of money and a glut of lawyers to persue any leads open to them. They have not spent so much time and money developing a monopoly on propriety to just let it go so easy. If and only if Microsoft realises the futility of their efforts might this infraction go unchallenged. After all if they can decode it then an encoder is not far away. And while this might mean real improvement to WMA Microsoft does not play well with anyone. I wish them the best. But I think there is a storm comming.

Yet they didn't do anything about DivX 3.11 ;-)

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #5 –
Supposidly even a WMAv2 decoder can play a WMA 9 file.

Quote
After all if they can decode it then an encoder is not far away. And while this might mean real improvement to WMA Microsoft does not play well with anyone.


I wouldn't count on it. It sounds like these guys got their hands on the WMA sdk for hardware devices and ported it (it would have been in C anyhow)

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #6 –
WMA decoding source code is available to all chip designers and DSP vendors,  so probably someone just took the source code to home

From what I've seen, it is very easy to implement it, so probably the implementation was done completely independently on the reference source code, so Microsoft can't do anything >unless< they have patent IPR's on WMA coding apparatus.

Open Wma Decoder

Reply #7 –
At least they can do nothing against source code if the source code is really written indenpendantly.

Now with the source code, I am wondering about a few claims from Amir.
He said several times that it was unfair to compare mp3 against wma because the wma is fixed bitrate and not the wma. But in the code I see no constraint on the bitrate, and I see a bit reservoir.

The same thing about joint stereo. Microsoft claimed several times (it's right that it was marketting documents) that there was no joint stereo because it could destroy the stereo image, but there is M/S coding.

Btw I do not think that they could have a patent on what I see in the decoder.
All the tools were previously known and already patended, or the patents are expired.