Windows Media 9 VS MPEG-4

J

jaredbkt

Registered
Take a look at this interesting article by everyone's favorite reporter (if you can call him that). In my opinion, most of what he says is basically Microsoft marketing and not much substance.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/wm9series.asp

Scroll down to the part about the Apple lies regarding media technologes. All he does is restate MS marketing and nothing more. Some investigative writing, eh?

I suggest everyone write a professionally worded email to him. Help our buddy, Paul, understand the benefits of MPEG 4 and open standards.
 
Good lord, that guy must have a real chip on his shoulder (and something else in another particular body part) to write such long winded drivel that praises Microsoft like a god.
 
heh, didn't anyone else read the section about 1/4 the way down that page, the section called 'Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless'. It says "You can fit 200 CDs worth of music in 50 GB using this codec."

That's 250 MB per CD. Say each CD has an average of 12 songs, that's 20.83 MB per song. With iTunes encoding on 160/kbps my songs are about 3 to 5 MB. When MP4 comes out, file sizes will be a lot smaller.

Now I've got about 50 CDs worth of songs using 2.35 GB. 200 CDs for me would use about 9.4 GB. I guess if Windows users want to take up 50 GB of disk space rather than the current 9.4 GB, and soon to be much smaller with MP4, they can go ahead and do that.

I'll stick with my Quicktime and iTunes ;)
 
You are missing the point entirely.

Paul is referring to using the Windows Media Lossless Codec. This compresses audio in a way that is mathematically lossless. No data is subtracted in the encoding process as it is with normal WMA, MP3, or MP4.

It is exactly the same data, bit-for-bit, but stored at a much smaller size. Using 160kbps encoding in iTunes or using any mainstream A/V compression technology such as normal WMA, MP3, MP4, etc. does not produce an exact copy of the data. WMA Lossless does. It is mainly for applications where you want to have the best quality possible, but want to save space -- like for archival of audio so that it doesn't take as much space as the original CD would, but is a perfect copy of the original audio. This can be used as a digital audio store from which you can encode to lossy formats when desired without having to go through the trouble of finding and re-ripping content from the original source each time a better technology emerges. And, unlike with lossy formats, you can transcode from WMA Lossless to other formats as much as you want without further degrading the quality of the content.

If file size is a concern, and you don't mind loss of some original audio data, you would use the regular or vbr WMA codecs which have greater compression/quality performance than MP4.
 
I was taking alot of what this guy was saying into account thinking that maybe he was telling the truth to a certain extent, but when i read his part about the Instant On streaming, and abotu how Apple really isn't doing it because it still buffers all the time, he lost all credibility with me. I never buffer on MP4 streaming, or see any buffering when i scrub through a stream. He then goes on to complain about how Apple still doesn't make all of its content set to Quicktime 6. Well, Apple doesn't lock out people who don't download the newest software ASAP like Microsoft does. Most of his points are highly flawed.
 
Even at 320Kbps, standard compression formats remove portions of data from the original source material to attain very small file sizes.

WMA Lossless does not remove any data, so audio quality is not sacrificed in any way. You pay for this with larger file sizes (but file sizes one-half to one-third the size of the original, with zero quality loss). If you don't mind a difference (no matter how slight) in audio quality, and your aim is to store/use music the way you currently use mp3s, you would use the regular WMA 9 CBR or VBR codecs. In this case, you will get audio quality that is generally better than mp3 or mp4, and has smaller file sizes.

Think of WMA Lossless as you would .zip-style file compression. If you were to compress a document using zip, you get the exact same document back when you unzip it. This is because zip uses lossless compression.
If zip used lossy compression, you would not be able to get back the document that you put in. The document you get back would be corrupted because data was taken out during the compression process that you can't get back.
This is how regular, lossy compression formats (WMA CBR/VBR, MP3, MP4, Ogg, etc.) work. Algorithms are used by the encoder to remove portions of the audio data that most people aren't likely to notice or care about substantially. Depending on how good your ears are, you may be able to detect the results of the missing audio data more or less depending on the encoding settings.
Other than being able to hear the results of loss of data, you also will continue to reduce the quality of your encoded audio if you try to convert it to other lossy formats (such as taking a WMA, converting to MP3, then MP4, then Ogg, etc.). If you want the highest quality whenever a new format comes out, you must go back to the original source material, or if you use lossless compression like WMA Lossless, the quality of the encoded material is always equal to the quality of the original source.

This is a crude example, but it is basically like this:
If your original source material were represented as a decimal value like 1.23456
WMA Lossless preserves this exact same value 1.23456
Normal, lossy codecs (WMA CBR/VBR, MP3, MP4, etc.) would round this value because the major aim is small file size with limited quality loss. So you may end up with 1.2
This is not the same data you started with, and each time you convert it to another lossy format, you lose even more data. So you next encoding of the song may give you 1, then .8, then you will eventually get to the point where the song is unrecognizable because each lossy conversion takes away more data.
 
GOSH!!!
after having read the story, i must thank bil gates very much for having invented multimedia on pc (apple just copied that), for providing the best multimedia SW and of course, for giving all this masterpieces of software engineering to us for free!

and of course apple is just copying MS, their standarts are not open and their architecture is worse than windows...

can't remember when i read such a bulls**t for the last time. apple rocks!

cheers!
 
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