WMA, what a joke. If you are using WMA, serves you right for using a crap proprietary format in the first place (and yes I'm aware that MP3 is also proprietary but it is an exception due to its ubiquity).

Its Microsoft designed to destroy all other forms of music encoding so Microsoft can be the dominant player.

If Apple had not invented the iPod and blown Microsoft out of the water everything would be pushed through Play For Sure stores offering highly restrictive DRM (much more than iTunes) with the subscription model shoved down our throats - you can never stop paying as you lose all your music - thus the music companies rake in the cash at the consumers expense - a typical Microsoft ploy.

And to top it all off it would only work on Windows.

I suppose you are if it won't play anything else ....

Dunno why you think thats 'better' but I'll stick with the much higher resolution/bitrate DivX/Xvid files my player handles thanks.


I don't care about DRM'd music. I never have, and never will, buy any. In non-DRM'd form a track, if properly encoded, will sound just as good in MP3, AAC, WMA or OGG. And from what I could see, it looks like there is some sort of WMA decoding available for the mac .... again, no idea about DRM'd stuff.

I don't give a toss about DRM. It's irrelevant to me. I'm referring to WMA as a compression method, nothing else.


WMA is no more or less proprietary than AAC. Take DRM out of the picture and it's possibly more widely supported than AAC. So, as I already asked when someone else said "it's crap" .... care to substantiate that?

I just did. You may not care about DRM and never buy anything with DRM on it. That does not do away with the fact that WMA was designed to be highly restrictive and to destroy the opposition leaving Microsoft in another Monopoly position to abuse.

h.264 is an excellent codec that can be used to encode in very high quality.

When I download TV shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm from the net they arrive in AVI format at around 250meg. I use a free program called iSquint to encode the to h.264, optimised for TV. The file size is reduced to around 80meg and the quality is excellent.

This has to be the most ridiculous thing ever posted on these boards. AAC is a standard thats been ratified by the ISO. It is free to distribute. It requires a patent license if you wish to develop a codec or supported hardware but unlike WMA, the patent holder is the standards body and not one company.

WMA is a proprietary format, unpublished and not ratified in anyway. How are they comparable?

Fair do's. On further reading, I'll give you that .... I'd misinterpreted the licenses required for AAC use.

In terms of sound quality though (which is what I was really on about in the first place), I'll stick by the statement that a well encoded WMA will sound just as good as a well encoded track using any other lossy format.

(Although I have to say, I have seen far more ridiculous things posted on here than that!)

Yet more rubbish. AAC is part of the MPEG ISO standard.

You seriously need to get your facts straight.

And regarding h.264, trust me, having done work on projects involving distribution of high volumes of video designed for display on 40" LCDs, nothing comes close to it in terms of quality to file-size ratio and it pisses all over DivX and Xvid.

AVI is not a format. It's a container.

h264 is capable of good results. I won't argue with that. The new gen iPods can player higher quality files than the last lot. (Albeit through overpriced cables if you want to watch it on your TV)

But, as things stand at the moment, there is not enough hardware out there supporting h264, it's slow to encode (much slower than DivX/Xvid at comparable quality) and it's nowhere near as easy to find content in h264 as it is in DivX/Xvid. In todays market, DivX/Xvid is the MP3 of digital video, like it or not.

This may all change in the future ..... who knows.

Betamax initially offered better quality than VHS (in pure technical terms .... not all that visible to the naked eye) but VHS was functionally more useful. You could draw parallels with h264. How many DVD players do you know that play it? Whereas you can pick up a DivX compatible DVD in a supermarket for £20 .....

True. However h.264 is now used to encode all video content for iTunes, is used on all Macs, any PC that uses Quicktime or iTunes, all iPods that can play video, the iPhone and Apple TV. That is quite a market. Then add in YouTube which encodes everythign now in h.264 and you can see it won't be going away.

H.264 will become the defacto codec in time. It already is a standard (again, DivX is proprietary but I do have a lot of time for Xvid... very nice results)

As for support:

Blu-ray
HD DVD
Xbox 360
PlayStation 3
Most OTT HDTV broadcasts (including BBC HD and Sky HD)
All iPods
Flash
YouTube
iTunes

The industry is fast getting behind it. It will mature in the next few years and you will see encoding times improve vastly.