On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Greg wrote:
> > > It's spreading fast !! Kinda like it's the MP3 for video...
> > Only for windoze...
> wasn't MP3 only on Windoze until some decided to port it to other
> systems ?

NO!!

mp3 was an open ISO standard *from day one*. In fact the first mp3 (and
mp2) encoders/decoders were on unix.

> DVD players nowadays play MP3.

Very, very few (see below)

> How can you say they won't play a not m$ version-tied MPEG-4 tomorrow ?

Repeat after me kids...

m$ "mpeg4" is not mpeg4
m$ "gsm" is not gsm
m$ "java" is not java
m$ "html" is not html
m$ "cp-1252" is not a standard charset encoding

I could go on and on...

if dvd players play mpeg-4 tomorrow, it won't be an m$-version of mpeg4.

And it will be a long time before mpeg-4 is adopted as standard for
hardware players. After all they don't have any compelling reason to
support it since mpeg2 is doing so well.

> If everybody starts using it for making movies, with free tools,
> like today MP3s who's going to stop it ?
> If it reaches a certain user-mass, DVD-players will play it too I guess.

Very few dvd-players play mp3 (raite, yamakawa, apex...), while 99% of
them do not. Hardly a very compelling argument for mp3, and even less for
mpeg4!

> To be honest, the only more thing I could wish about this is to be released as
> open-source of course.

m$ release source code for their OS DLLs? you must be kidding.

-Dan