iTunes and WMA

[patrick0brien]

Originally posted by imbriumink
Um. Speaking of proprietary standards, does anything besides iTunes or Quicktime play mp4 or AAC.

-imbriumink

Not yet, but then that's not the definition of proprietary.

Proprietary:
Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent:

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

AAC, or Advanced Audio Codec is a standard of the MPEG 4 suite of applicable technologies - therefore, no single entity has control of the technology.

WMA/V are owned by Microsoft, and therefore, they can do with it what they please - like suddently change the format, and charge $40 per song, per play to get it to work again.

This is an extreme example, but not too far from reality - have you seen the price of Office lately?

I'll stick with industry standards...

 

[tpjunkie]

And by the way, VLC will play either of those formats (well, aac is a subset of MP4)

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by imbriumink
Um. Speaking of proprietary standards, does anything besides iTunes or Quicktime play mp4 or AAC. I'm a recent switcher and I have to agree with the windows programmer guy. WMA encoder is freely distributed and it's easy to use. I used to convert to wmv9 to distribute my videos over the internet since everybody I know uses PCs except me. I use both PC and mac. The only reason I never ripped to WMA is because I knew I was switching to a Mac. BTW, to encode mp3s in WMP, you have BUY a plugin.

I speaking of things I think I remember hearing and assumptions so I could be completely wrong /disclaimer.

AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 is to MPEG. It's a industry agreed upon standard that anyone can use. There is nothing Apple-centric about AAC. Apple chose to go w/a standard format unlike MS which, as usual, chose to create a propriatary format and will attempt to leverage the market to use it's codec.



Lethal

EDIT: Man, I didn't think I took that long to type out my reply.