[Openal] MP3-Player and License

[Ed Phillips]

Hey,

On Fri, 26 May 2006, Tyler Olsen wrote:

> Ed Phillips wrote:
>> 
>> One thing to note... at the bottom of the page here:
>> 
>> http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/games.html
>> 
>> There is a note that says no license fees are due if less than 5000 copies 
>> of the game are distributed.  Not much help for those interesed in 
>> distributing a GPL'd game, but maybe for a company that is distributing a 
>> modest number of copies of its game.
>> 
>> Personally, I'd also suggest to use Ogg.  There's no good reason to use MP3 
>> for games unless you want to allow the user to play their own music with 
>> the game - and even then, you can tell users to convert their music to Ogg 
>> format to be compatible with the game.
>> 
>>     Ed
>
> True, but then you have the overhead of making sure that you distribute no 
> more than 5,000 copies of your game. Unless you are only selling your game 
> via retail, that is not trivial to do (and if your goal is to make a profit, 
> why pay the licensing fees in the first place?). Also if you choose MP3 and 
> modestly assume that you'll never distribute more than 5,000 copies, what are 
> you to do should you get more than 5,000 buyers? Cough up the royalty fees, 
> or tell your potential players "Sorry but we can not distribute more than 
> 5,000 copies"?

Once you've sold 5,000 copies of the game, it should be a lot easier to 
cough up the fee... ;-)  Until then, you don't have to worry about it. 
But as I said, this really isn't a good option for software distributed 
without a fee.

> I think of that "free under 5,000 distributed copies" rule by the 
> licensing company as nothing more than a trap to lure in uncareful 
> victims. Just stick with Ogg.

Of course... that's how they "get you".  But we have Ogg now... :->

> But keep in mind that Ogg and MP3 are both lossy codecs, which throw 
> away different parts of the audio stream. Therefore doing a direct 
> conversion of one to the other will result in a degrade in audio 
> quality.

Yep.  Users don't care that much... they just want to listen to their own 
music.  If they really cared about preserving the exact bits of the audio, 
they wouldn't use MP3/Ogg in the first place... ;-)

Another option is to allow users to play WAV (or other uncompressed 
format) files they could create from whatever audio files they have... or 
play CD tracks on the CD drive (lots of older games did this).  Also, a 
game can be written to make calls to the mmsystem.h stuff to tell to 
Windows to "play <user-specified audio file>"... so the licensing fee 
issue would be moot... the game itself would not be decoding anything 
(Windows or some other program would be doing it).

So, there are ways to add support for user-MP3s if needed.  That's about 
the only reason I can see for having MP3 support in a game.

 	Ed

Ed Phillips <ed at udel.edu> University of Delaware (302) 831-6082
Systems Programmer III, Network and Systems Services