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PatentsPatentsPosted Mar 13, 2008 1:55 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: Some topics related to MP3 players
About patents... typically the hardware for these gadgets includes a hardware MP3 decoder on-chip, and the vendor gets a license along with the chip, so it's actually easier for player vendors than it would be for Red Hat.
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Patents Posted Mar 13, 2008 11:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I can't think of a current MP3 player which does MP3 decoding in hardware. One of the reasons for the huge delay before the not-release of Rockbox 3 was the implementation of a software codec layer (with the corresponding explosion of supported codec format), because the Archos was the only platform Rockbox worked on which had a chip to do it. Everything else uses CPUs: it's cheaper (modulo patent rubbish), more flexible, and with modern CPUs faster too.
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