Fred wrote:The mp3 technology is patent. Even if you write the decoder yourself, you have to paid.. It's not a code licensing here.
But the patents of mp3 are not valid everywhere. As far as i can remember, only in Germany and US. Many countries (even in europe) dosen't consider it valid.
In the first times (90s) Fraunhofer try to stop things like LAME, Bladeenc, etc. but they can't since many countries declare that the patents are not valid on their countries. From then you can find/use/download many mp3 encoder decoders without any problem.
At the beggining only Fraunhofer and Xing, now there are many.
In fact Fraunhofer dosen't has success trying to get money from patens in the late 90s and i think they abandon this effort, Microsoft is his client and with this one they go to every PC.
But Fred, you could use the codex that Microsoft paid and that are allready installed on the PC (fraunhofer ones) and dont need to pay for using it.