Fedora Will Land A Free Software But "Crippled" AAC Decoder

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Will Land A Free Software But "Crippled" AAC Decoder

The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Crippled-AAC-Decoder

[dungeon]

This aac reminds me on about 2 decade old things...

Why not mentioning that gtk2 sees new release these days, xine also released, etc...

[eydee]

Fedora = 1% Linux + 99% Politics.

[rubdos]

Fedora = 1% Linux + 99% Politics.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Those guys know where it's at. With Fedora, you know you have a legally compliant distribution.

[dungeon]

Fedora = 1% Linux + 99% Politics.

Linux is just a kernel

Debian GNU/Hurd 0% Linux + 100% politics

[You-]

Is there any information about how crippled this codec is?#

Like what approximate % of the audio out there is of the form that cannot be played?

[Brisse]

Is there any information about how crippled this codec is?#

Like what approximate % of the audio out there is of the form that cannot be played?

The article explains it perfectly well if you understand how spectral band replication (SBR) works.

HE-AAC is an extension of LC-AAC, also called just AAC, and adds the spectral band replication which basically filters out high frequencies during encoding to reduce amount of bits and then when playing back the content, the decoder looks for harmonic content in lower frequencies to try to guess what the higher frequencies were and tries to replicate them.

So what this means is that Fedoras decoder will have spectral band replication disabled so it won't try to reproduce those high frequencies. Exactly where the frequency cutoff is cannot be said, because it depends on the encoder settings.

Anyway, HE-AAC is only for very low bitrate applications and always comes at a noticeable quality loss compared to high bitrate LC-AAC anyway, so it should be avoided whenever possible. It's only relevant below 80kbit/s or so for stereo content.

[eydee]

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Those guys know where it's at. With Fedora, you know you have a legally compliant distribution.

You can't make something accessible for an international audience legal or illegal, as laws differ in every country.

[Luke]

This should be enough to handle AAC in video files produced by consumer grade video cameras, though the fact that these cameras usually write H264 as the video codec will be an issue for those vulnerable to patent issues. My guess is in the US and given the MPEG-LA declaration that non-monetized video is now licensed to use H264 for free, this will mostly mean US based commercial users, potentially including those who sell ads on their videos and do so while self-hosting or host from the cloud on their own website.

[Anvil]

Fedora = 1% Linux + 99% Politics.

a lot of people are leaving Fedora an using Arch Linux. the way i see it Fedora is going downhill, they dont care about there Users. but why bother shipping a Crippled Codec? if its Crippled who in the hell is gonna use it to begin with