Have you seen Ogg Vorbis, and what about MP3 royalties?
Vorbis is at an early stage of development. We did not know of its existance until this player’s design was nearly complete. It looks like Vorbis has a bright future in the streaming market. As far as displacing MP3 with consumers and file sharing, it remains to be seen if that’ll happen. This player is designed so that you put the drive into your PC and just copy all the existing files onto it, so it really needs to support whatever format the files happen to be on the user’s drive. Today that’s MP3 and it is not Ogg Vorbis. The player uses the STA013 chip. The royalty is rolled up into the price of this chip, so every one of our players has the royalty properly paid. Even without the royalty, the STA013 seems to be the most cost effective choice.
