One of the more interesting smart storage devices introduced at CeBIT was the Archos AV340, a 40 GB video player and recorder with a 640×368 screen. It stores up to 80 hours of content — that’s a minimum datarate of around 1 Mbit/sec — for viewing on the device’s 3.8″ screen or a television. It can also be used as a 3 megapixel digital camera with an optional attachment, and will apparently sell for just north of $500.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I believe that Archos either lying or confused about their MPEG-4 support. The press release specifically talks about the device’s MPEG-4 codec, and says that it supports MP3 audio rather than MP4 audio — that suggests that this device might just be a DivX AVI player/recorder rather than an MPEG-4 player/recorder, which makes it a short-term solution that I couldn’t recommend to anyone.

• Archos PR (PDF)
• Wired item

The L.A. Times is reporting that Apple will be introducing a Mac-only music service, using iTunes as the client and MPEG-4 AAC (rather than MP3) as the delivery format. A source told the L.A. Times:

This is exactly what the music industry has been waiting for. It’s hip. It’s quick. It’s easy. If people on the internet are actually interested in buying music, not just stealing it, this is the answer.

Yeeesh — clearly an Apple marketeer using the Times to say what they can’t officially say as an Apple marketeer. Happily, just after that vacuous quote comes this useful perspective from the story’s author, Jon Healey:

That ease of use has music executives optimistic that the Apple service will be an effective antidote to surging piracy on the Internet, sources said.

Other legitimate music services have cumbersome technology and pricing plans — motivated in part by the labels’ demands for security — that make them much harder to use than unauthorized online services, such as the Kazaa file-sharing system.

Bingo. The customer is not the enemy, but the customer wants what they want. People wouldn’t steal music if there was a legit, reasonably-priced alternative that provided the same convenience and freedoms. In fact, commercial services should be able to provide far more convenience with features like better searching, affinity-based recommendations, and fast and reliable downloads. But if the Apple service uses DRM to restrict what users can do — and the L.A. Times story suggests that it will — then Apple’s service is going to suffer from the same lethargic uptake as the others.

Apple has apparently signed up four of the five major labels — BMG (Bertelsmann), EMI Group, Universal Music Group (Vivendi Universal) and Warner Music Group (AOL Time Warner) are reportedly on board. Sony Music Entertainment is holding out because — and try not to choke on the irony — they’re concerned that users will be allowed to put purchased music on CDs. One wonders if it might be better for Sony Music if just stopped selling CDs immediately.

Partnering with Apple is a brilliant move on the part of the labels. Not only do Mac users tend to consume more music than the average Wintel user, but it means that they can avoid supporting Mac OS in their own offerings. And with less than 3% of the PC marketshare, the Apple’s customer base is a good place to experiment with business models.

• L.A. Times story (free registration required)
• News.com story

MPEG LA — one or two “one-stop shops” for MPEG-4 patent licensing (erm, isn’t that a “two-stop shop”, then?) — has released the MPEG-4 Systems license.

The Systems license the last piece of the long-in-coming patent portfolio puzzle. The Systems license covers the MPEG-4 file format, MPEG-4’s interactive features, the MPEG-4 scene description language (BIFS), and the MPEG-4 object descriptor framework.

The object descriptor framework is an extensible model for describing objects and inter-object synchronization. For example, a news broadcast stream may include a “virtual set” object, an “on-air personality” object and a “stock ticker” object.

BIFS (BInary Format for Scene) lets you specify the spatial and temporal composition of objects. It’s a binary standard based on VRML, which nobody wanted the first time around. SMIL enables the same thing, but it works with much more than just MPEG-4, and for this and other reasons I think that BIFS is doomed in the long run.

The file format is obviously the most important part of the Systems license in the short term. I think it was a mistake to group the file format in with a lot of cruft (some of which, granted, is nifty) that the majority of implementations aren’t going to implement within the next few years. My understanding is that MPEG is in the process of reorganizing the Systems specification into several parts, and hopefully this will allow super-inexpensive (free, ideally) licensing of the file format.

Finally, we don’t know what the terms of the System license are yet. Rob Koenen, President of the M4IF (MPEG-4 Industry Forum), had not seen the license as of MPEG LA’s announcement, but said that he expected it to be less controversial than the Visual license given the draft terms that were released last year.

• MPEG LA PR

Tom’s Hardware Guide (THG) has always confused the DivX codec (once a hack of an old version of the Windows Media Video codec, now an actual MPEG-4 Video codec) with the MPEG-4 format (which supports several codecs, including the MPEG-4 Video codec). The cluelessness continues in their review of the KiSS Technology DP-450.

THG’s review of the DP-500 notes that it supports the DivX “format”, which they incorrectly equate with MPEG-4. The player does support DivX-style Franken-AVIs that use MPEG-4 Video (Advanced Simple Profile) for video and MP3 for audio, but it doesn’t support MPEG-4. The DP-500 doesn’t even use DivX for their video (which makes the THG review all the more bewildering), but uses REALmagic’s 8500 hardware decoder instead.

In review, (1) the DP-500 does not support MPEG-4, (2) the DP-500 does not use the DivX codec, and (3) avoid Tom’s Hardware Guide when it comes to anything having to do with MPEG-4.

• KiSS Technology
• Tom’s Hardware Guide: DP-450 review

Ben Waggoner has been helping Robert X. Cringely with an MPEG-4 encoder evaluation for NerdTV. Ben did all of the encoding, and then stepped out of the way to let Robert and his team pick the best.

Sorenson’s forthcoming Squeeze 3, a $199 MPEG-4 encoder, was unanimously (all viewers determined it did best on all of the samples) chosen as the best.

QuickTime’s MPEG-4 encoder came in dead last. Clearly, avoid QuickTime’s MPEG-4 encoder for professional work. | Post announcing encoder showdown | Post announcing winner | Sorenson Squeeze 3 for MPEG-4 announcement

The MPEG-4 Audio Licensing Committee (ALC) have selected Via Licensing as the licensing administrator for the MPEG-4 Audio patent pool. This is a good thing, I suppose, but it’s troubling that MPEG-4 technology and content developers will have at least two “one-stop shops” for MPEG-4 patent portfolio licensing — MPEG LA for video and Via Licensing for audio.

The M4IF (MPEG-4 Industry Forum) asked the ALC to develop licensing terms for three audio profiles: High Quality Audio Profile, Speech Audio Profile and Mobile Audio Internetworking (“MAUI”) Profile. Additionally, the ALC will be working with Via Licensing to develop terms for other audio technologies that fall outside the three standard profiles.

The Speech Audio Profile will cover CELP (“Code Excited Linear Prediction”, a speech codec), HVXC (“Harmonic Vector Excitation Coding”, a speech codec) and TTSI (“Text-to-Speech Interface”, a standard way to control text-to-speech functionality).

The High Quality Audio Profile will cover AAC LC, AAC LTP, AAC Scalable, CELP, ER AAC LC, ER AAC LTP, ER AAC Scalable, ER CELP. AAC is an audio codec that works great for music, and CELP is a speech codec. (To deciper the notation tacked on before and after the codec names, see the paragraph after next.)

The Mobile Audio Internetworking Profile will cover these technologies: ER AAC LC, ER AAC Scalable, ER TwinVQ, ER BSAC, ER AAC LD. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), TwinVQ and BSAC (Bit Sliced Arithmetic Coding) are audio/music codecs. (To deciper the notation tacked on before and after the codec names, see the next paragraph.)

The notation tacked on before and after the codec names are “tools”, which is an MPEG-ism for “features”. The LC tool is “low complexity”, which significantly reduces decoding complexity (say, for low-power devices) at the cost of a small quality hit. The LTP tool is “long-term prediction”, which provides significant quality improvements at the cost of being somewhta more complex to decode. The ER tool is “error resiliant”, and allows you to stream over lossy transports (like RTSP). The LD tool is “low delay”, which is handy for live streaming and other less-latency-is-better applications. The Scalability tool effciently encodes multiple audio bitrates into a single audio bitstream.

The ALC plans to deliver the MPEG-4 Audio Profile license agreements in Q1’03. | Dolby press release