Latest MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding (ALS)
Reply #19 – 2006-05-12 06:32:26
---snip--- Why do I say that it's the end user that has the most impact? Well look back to encoding a few years ago. People were storing MPEG-4 SP in AVI (via DivX 3.11 etc); at that time AVI was familliar to them, and MP3 was good enough. There wasn't enough incentive (or tools available, this is the important part) to use MP4 for instance. People got used to encoding with DivX and storing in AVI. As DivX progressed and they introduced B-frames, they obviously didn't want to jump ship to MP4 because they would huge amounts of people, and lose custom. Naturally the solution was to hack B-frames into AVI to keep the end user happy. If you look around now, you will even find hardware MPEG-4 ASP players that support ASP in AVI, and some of these do not even mention MP4! How crazy is that? The standard container is not even supported! ---snip--- ---snip--- As for the second point. I really don't know what they was thinking making a Winamp plugin first, a Directshow decoder would have been so much more useful. ---snip--- Hi Zero1 The role of the DivX developers cannot be overlooked in the propagation of DivX in AVI as an usable proposition. Looking at the group developing MP4ALS and referring to Garf's observations, I am not sure if they are too interested in making it workable using the MP4 container, leave alone a hack. This kind of reduces the appeal in using MP4ALS right now. Of course, this is just my personal view The other thing is the decoder for Winamp. Not being able to tag it from within Winamp will definitely put off many people. Even if they decide to try the format, this fact might leave a bitter taste and they may not adapt to the format easily later, even if the bugs are ironed out. In short, they must adhere to the MP4 container standard. I guess this will be advatageous to all concerned. If what Garf has said is true, the format might have a rough ride ahead.