aroon
100+ Head-Fier
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straight from this slashdot entry, a bit of news about the stuff being shown at CES in vegas:
Since I'm in the market for a portable Ogg Vorbis player, I've asked at several of the manufacturer's booths whether they plan to support it, and specifically whether they will sell CD-based units with Vorbis decoders. (I've been encoding my CDs to Vorbis for the last few years; YMMV, but I like it.)
The results are about what I'd expect: a polite "not on our radar screen" is the gist of responses from representatives at Creative, Sony, and nearly all the other Big Names; at the lower-end makers booths (who, after all, make things like $40 MP3 CD players available at mass-market retailers), I never even found anyone who'd heard of Ogg. iRiver is the current standout in this regard, since they're releasing firmware to make their CD-based players Ogg-friendly; I'll be visiting iRiver's product lounge soon to take a look at their current lineup. I also found flash-based players from Samsung and Rio.
This isn't surprising in the crowded world of audio codecs: MP3 has the benefit of years of market saturation; Microsoft has the research and marketing clout to develop and license WMA; and the Apple touch, via ITMS, has make AAC a nearly overnight contender. (Microsoft was showing off in a dedicated booth a few dozen models of portable audio players, like the Rio Nitrus, that will play WMA files in addition to MP3s, including the smallest 20GB hard-drive based model I've yet encountered, the not-yet-in-the-U.S. Toshiba Gigabeat MEG200J. Think of portable audio as sculpted by Minox.)
However, I did find one working CD-based Ogg-playing portable (model MCD-CM600, part of the "Yepp" line) on display in the Samsung area. "On display" is pushing things; several examples of the player were on hand, but behind plexiglas as window dressing rather than as a demonstration product. A company representative did some Won-to-dollars calculation, and said the player is available in Korea for between $130-140 dollars at current exchange rates, but that Samsung had no current plans to sell it in the U.S.
my two cents: may be im seeing something very wrong here but isnt Ogg Vorbis a completely open and free standard with encoders and decoders all over the place? I know a lot of consumers have no idea what it is but surely at least some of the engineers and designers of these portable players have at heard of it. if it costs them next to nothing to toss in another feature of their product, why not do it? i guess i can understand the lack of support on portable cd players [kind of], but portable HD and flash music players? why not add in another really cheap to implement feature and attract a lot more of those customers that generally happen to be the ones to sell your product for you via word of mouth?
Since I'm in the market for a portable Ogg Vorbis player, I've asked at several of the manufacturer's booths whether they plan to support it, and specifically whether they will sell CD-based units with Vorbis decoders. (I've been encoding my CDs to Vorbis for the last few years; YMMV, but I like it.)
The results are about what I'd expect: a polite "not on our radar screen" is the gist of responses from representatives at Creative, Sony, and nearly all the other Big Names; at the lower-end makers booths (who, after all, make things like $40 MP3 CD players available at mass-market retailers), I never even found anyone who'd heard of Ogg. iRiver is the current standout in this regard, since they're releasing firmware to make their CD-based players Ogg-friendly; I'll be visiting iRiver's product lounge soon to take a look at their current lineup. I also found flash-based players from Samsung and Rio.
This isn't surprising in the crowded world of audio codecs: MP3 has the benefit of years of market saturation; Microsoft has the research and marketing clout to develop and license WMA; and the Apple touch, via ITMS, has make AAC a nearly overnight contender. (Microsoft was showing off in a dedicated booth a few dozen models of portable audio players, like the Rio Nitrus, that will play WMA files in addition to MP3s, including the smallest 20GB hard-drive based model I've yet encountered, the not-yet-in-the-U.S. Toshiba Gigabeat MEG200J. Think of portable audio as sculpted by Minox.)
However, I did find one working CD-based Ogg-playing portable (model MCD-CM600, part of the "Yepp" line) on display in the Samsung area. "On display" is pushing things; several examples of the player were on hand, but behind plexiglas as window dressing rather than as a demonstration product. A company representative did some Won-to-dollars calculation, and said the player is available in Korea for between $130-140 dollars at current exchange rates, but that Samsung had no current plans to sell it in the U.S.
my two cents: may be im seeing something very wrong here but isnt Ogg Vorbis a completely open and free standard with encoders and decoders all over the place? I know a lot of consumers have no idea what it is but surely at least some of the engineers and designers of these portable players have at heard of it. if it costs them next to nothing to toss in another feature of their product, why not do it? i guess i can understand the lack of support on portable cd players [kind of], but portable HD and flash music players? why not add in another really cheap to implement feature and attract a lot more of those customers that generally happen to be the ones to sell your product for you via word of mouth?
