On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote: > This is a typical FUD approach presentend by the competition. > If I have anything to say about, I'd say that any Ambisonis based approach > would be "patent-light", iof not patent-free.
You confirm precisely the concern I raised: The result would likely be a royalty bearing format. How can you accuse me of FUD while concurrently affirming the concern I raised? If people believe there is a market for ambisonic distribution which has less than lossless quality but only if the bitrate is low enough then the parties who would profit from that should cooperate to produce a royalty free format so that their success will not be saddled with additional friction which will keep ambisonics in a niche. AAC + mpeg surround licensing costs over $1 decoder unit— to be added on top of the additional hardware costs (more DSP cpu cycles) required. Because the market for this technology barely exists the licensing costs could quite possibly keep it in a non-existing state. I think surround advocates would very much like it if support ended up in everything because the cost of doing so is only a modest hardware bump and some one time integration and testing costs. Per-unit royalties or even just the cost of negotiating a flat rate license strongly discourage deployment. In some markets like support in web browsers or in Free software which are distributed at no direct cost any royalty at all is a major or absolute barrier. I think it would be irrational for anyone who wants there to be a market for this to contribute to the development of a royalty bearing effort. You may disagree, but I still do not think it should be a concern which goes without mention. If pointing to an elephant in the room makes me guilty of FUD then so be it. > P.S.: 1st order Ambisonics should be patent-free, nowadays. > Higher orders can't be "overpatented", because the theory behind is quite > old. Certainly more than 20 years back... Yes, they are _now_. I think it would be a shame to revert ambisonics back to the bad— harder to deploy— state where including support for the distribution format required unfortunate per-unit or per-organization royalties and burdensome license negotiation. > P.S. 2: And I for my part didn't patent "Ambisonics of order >=2 + front > channels"... Promised! :-D Thank you for not being personally evil. :P _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
