New Audio Format Could Be a Windows Media Killer
by Curtis Lee Fulton (G2 News)
October 21, 2002
Coding Technologies Sweden, the first company to cut an MP3 decoding chip, has set up shop on the West Coast of the US ready to wage war with its neighbors, the Microsoft empire and RealNetworks. While both Microsoft and Real have relentlessly pursued numerous deals with chipmakers and hardware makers to get their compression formats supported in non-PC products such as DVD players and car stereos, Coding Technologies has gotten its compression technology picked as the standard audio format for MPEG-4 - the one deal that really counts.
Coding Technologies' new office is in Silicon Valley. It has hired David Frerichs, former CTO of Internet audio technology provider IM Networks, as the US outpost's VP and general manager. Frerichs said the company's new office was established to build relationships with US and Japanese firms. "Everybody comes to Silicon Valley," he said. Besides, he said, the West Coast office moves the company closer to Japan's time zone, making meetings easier.
At the core of Coding Technologies' compression technique is a patent it owns for something called "spectral band replication" (SBR). Rather than being a specific compression format, SBR can theoretically be applied to any existing compression format and double the performance.
SBR is at the heart of MP3Pro, the next-generation format for the near-universal MP3 format. MP3Pro was developed jointly with the German research group Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FhG), the patent holder of the MP3. By applying SBR to MP3, the two were able to produce a new format that took half the space of an MP3 file to produce CD-quality output. The SBR algorithm also makes MP3Pro players backward-compatible with standard MP3 files and, surprisingly, even MP3Pro files can be played in standard MP3 players, although there's a loss of quality.
Although MP3Pro has been out for a year, its use has been minimal. Frerichs points out that the MP3 format is ten-years-old, so when compared to the MP3 lifecycle, a year is nothing for MP3Pro. Portable MP3Pro players only hit the shelves a month ago.
What could really entrench Coding Technologies in the digital audio business is its relationship with MPEG. MPEG has selected SBR as the reference model for the bandwidth enhancement technologies inside MPEG, which will result in extending the MPEG-4 specification. SBR is used to double the compression ratio of the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio compression format, which is part of the MPEG-4 standard. The resulting format, called aacPlus, offers CD-quality sound at 48 KBps - close to a three times better compression ratio than a CD-quality MP3. The aacPlus format is used by XM Satellite Radio to encode its digital radio signals.
MPEG-4 is the horse that Coding Technologies could ride to victory. The increasingly accepted audio and video compression standard is working its way into PDAs, cell phones, set-top boxes and portable media players. RealNetworks' Helix server can dish out MPEG-4 streams, as can Apple's Darwin streaming server. Apple's Quicktime 6 video format is based entirely on MPEG-4 and RealNetworks says it plans to get its RealOne streams up to MPEG-4 levels soon. The only big company to shun MPEG-4 is of course Microsoft.
Unlike Microsoft media, MPEG standards are open. The standards are derived from a smorgasbord of patent owners that are well documented. MPEG corrals patent fees from software developers and then splits the revenue among the patent owners. Microsoft, on the other hand, keeps its standard closed and earns revenue by licensing software to chipmakers and hardware developers.
However, Microsoft has done a pretty good job of setting itself up to get Windows Media included in various embedded devices. Last December Windows Media closed deals with chipmakers Cirrus Logic and Zoran to make a line of DVD chips that included Microsoft's formats.
But Frerichs isn't worried. "There's some devices out there that support Windows Media," he said, "but there's a lot of devices that are MPEG-only, and no devices that are Microsoft-only." He says that despite Microsoft's dominance, device makers want open standards, because once the product ships, upgrading a compression codec is impossible. "In the computer world, it's fairly easy to have a closed standard because you can just download and install the new codec," he remarked. "In the embedded world, that's impossible.