Does Trisquel support MP3 now?
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It's been 20 years since the 1995 revision, so most the software patents should be expired by now though the last revision was made in 1998, so the latest revision is only a few years away.
I find it odd that I saw on a post that's a couple years old that you don't support MP3 because of patents, but you have a x264 repo. Now what's up with that? Is that a version of x264 that has the features that violate software patents removed?
http://in.archive.trisquel.info/trisquel/pool/main/x/x264/
On that note of x264, the expiration of the h264 baseline patents are 8 years away, so I'm looking forward to that. (Though the latest revision of h264 won't be patent-free until the baseline h265 standard is patent-free)
Please correct me if my memory is betraying me here, but I thought that i once listened to mp3 with a fresh trisquel default install.
Or is this impossible?
I know at least that it's possible to listen to mp3 with free software.
Well, the software has been free, I just hear the Free Software community is scared of Software Patents. Teisquel is based on Ubuntu LTS and I'm not sure if the last LTS had patent-free MP3 support.
I'm not using trisquel now, but I look forward to trying it with a free bios once I save my pennies for another computer.
I don't know where you got the idea that Trisquel can't play MP3 files. Trisquel has never not supported MP3 since the time I started using it, and I was using it by 2012.
As far as the patents themselves go, there are still some patents on MP3 for a few years (I think they'll all be expired after 2018), and h.264 patents are staying around for much longer.
I got it from this post: http://trisquel.info/en/forum/why-dont-free-systems-support-mp3
It looks like that post was made on the year that would be the 20 year mark for the initial MP3 standard, so it might have became patent-free a few months after that post.
That post said nothing about Trisquel, and Trisquel definitely had support for patented formats at that time. It applies to systems like Fedora, which are sponsored by companies and therefore follow stricter rules. Also, since Trisquel has historically been developed from Spain, it's been a non-issue for this distro (I even mentioned this in that very thread!), though I don't know if that particular aspect applies anymore.
And no, MP3 is not "patent-free", and wasn't "patent-free" in 2013. Many MP3-related patents have expired, but until ALL of them are expired, the format remains patent-encumbered.
Oh, OK, I see.
Yeah, in 2018, the last patent on MP3 should expire. Even though that codec is so shitty, the best implementation is "LAME" and even that is lame. Flac is where it's at with ogg being the king of lossy audio.
"ogg being the king of lossy audio."
I'd like to make a few points.
Ogg is only a container, not a codec. Think of it being the difference between a box that holds stuff vs. the stuff that goes into that box. "Ogg" is the box.
You're probably thinking of Vorbis, which commonly goes into the Ogg container (but other things can too), but Vorbis not "the king" anymore. Released back in 2000, the Vorbis codec is about three-fourths of the way through its approximate intended lifetime of 20 years or so.
Things have improved considerably since Vorbis's introduction 15 years ago, and Opus is the new "king" of the free audio codec hill. In fact, if you'll notice, http://vorbis.com has a banner at the top in order to steer people to Opus.
(And to help point out the container vs. codec difference, Opus can also go into an Ogg container, so referring to a codec by the container's file extension can cause confusion because two files with the same container might have completely different codecs inside.)
For example: Can you tell which of these files uses Vorbis and which uses Opus from their name?
file1.ogg and file2.ogg
Maybe they both use Vorbis. Maybe they both use Opus. Maybe one is one Vorbis and one is Opus. But which is which? And maybe they use a completely different codecs entirely (The Ogg container is flexible enough to support many codecs.)
I am a translator!
>For example: Can you tell which of these files uses Vorbis and which uses Opus from their name?
file1.ogg and file2.ogg
Yes. The first one is clearly Vorbis and the second one is evidently Opus.
With Nautilus, you just need to right click on it and go to "properties" and it tells you what codecs, frame rate, bitrate and sample rates are being used.
There's also ffmpeg (or avconv) -i media_file_name.whatever
According to Richard Stallman, it's a bad practice to deny the existence
of a free software that allows the user to at least play/view or decode
their data that is stored using a patent-encumbered file format or that
is stored using a file format used by non-free software[1] (I'm not even
talking about international standards here, since internationally
standardized file formats can't actually prove that it'll be used my
free software by default, and as a bad example we have a ISO for Office
Open XML[2], which is the DOCX, PPTX, and-so-on file formats).
If free software exists to open the file, then let's use it!
However, and also based on Richard Stallman's talk, once you open the
file, it's recommended for you to save it using a file format used by
free software by default, because otherwise, distributing the same file
with a file format used by non-free software will just push society's
dependency on non-free software even further.
Besides, you can't expect for your "favorite MP3 decoder and player" to
always be reliable in situations where, for some reason, people start
using a "new version of MP3". Furthermore, most free software projects
that provide the capability to open/view/decode file formats used by
non-free software are, actually, reverse engineering efforts, and
society can't always rely on that, mainly because it'll just solve the
problem after it has been created, not before.
REFERENCES
[1] http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/2013-01-29--rms--valencia.webm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Exactly, it is a very bad thing to put your content into a patented or even worse a DRM based format; But it shouldn't be a reason for you to not decode it into a libre system/format. DVD for example is a terrible format but because we can decode it with free software - we can at least use it as we please to some degree. It doesn't require a proprietary system to decode it.
I used to download Aubile audio books and then liberate them to a libre format for my own usage, that said it was using the "analogue hole" to do it. ;)
Trisquel has never not supported MP3 since the time I started using it, and I was using it by 2012.
I was using Trisquel by 2010 (2009?) and I confirm: free (as in freedom) codecs to any popular format (including MP3) have always been part of the default install.
Yes, and it has for ages now.
Or at least that's what happens when all gstreamer plugins available in the repos are installed........or you're using an Mplayer player rather than a Gstreamer player......or of course VLC.
You should be able to get MP3 support on Trisquel by installing the
libavcodec-extra-54 package (you may need to uninstall vlc beforehand
from memory).
This is in place of the libavcodec54 codec which is installed by default
and doesn't support MP3.
Again: Trisquel has always has MP3 support out of the box. Thanks to the "ugly" set of the GStreamer plugins I believe.
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