Lack of AAC support on budget players

[Pulsar_t]

Is it a royalties thing? I thought nobody 'owns' MPEG4' which is why it's so popular? And besides there's an open source decoder library that's available. And by budget I mean the $25-50 range players. Samsung and COBY players don't support MP4/M4A/AAC yet you can find support for FLAC, Ogg and WMA!

[noiseredux]

lookup Rockbox. You can load Rockbox on most mp3 players and it does waaaay more than the default.

[Hobie-wan]

MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, and they certainly 'own' it. MP3 is partially under them and partially under Fraunhofer IIS but is included because it is the most popular format. Ogg Vorbis is open source, as it FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec).

[Pulsar_t]

I know about MPEG, but since MPEG4 is more 'open' than MPEG1 or 2 (my impression anyway) I was wondering why supporting it would be unfeasible. Nero's AAC encoder is among the best, and I reckon they don't pay royalties for every downloaded copy. Likewise FAAD2 supports AAC decoding and is open-source. There are no-brand gadgets that support AAC, but they're usually of cheap build and break easily.

@noiseredux thanks will try it out!

[Hatta]

I'll second the Rockbox recommendation. It's really amazing how configurable it is. It even plays GB(C) games!

[Hobie-wan]

I know about MPEG, but since MPEG4 is more 'open' than MPEG1 or 2 (my impression anyway) I was wondering why supporting it would be unfeasible.

Seems like it is sitll bieng fought over to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_4#Licensing