• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m guessing you never lived through the iPod/MP3 player era? You do not need a professional audio device to enjoy music. Most people would happily live by with a crappy $20 earbud.

    You have to remember that not that long ago, every phone used to have a headphone jack built in. It wasn’t until Apple created the problem of removing the headphone jack, and created the solution in the Airpods (which generated massive amounts of profit), that other manufacturers followed suit. It never was organic.


  • IMO, once phone manufacturers decide to remove headphone jacks from their devices, the discussion of wired vs wireless is inevitable since you are forcing customers to make a choice/sacrifice. Headphones very much still use 3.5mm jacks, especially in high end headphones where there are also other types of plugs for balanced audio. Wireless tech is not going to replace it anytime soon, and headphones that end with a USB port are few and far between. Although there are solutions out there like dongles and Hi-Fi Bluetooth receivers, to some they are still an extra thing to manage, while with a built in headphone jack all of the hassle would be gone.



  • One thing people don’t/forget to mention, is that the microphones in even earpods tier wired earphones will sound infinitely better than most mics in Bluetooth headphones, even in the multiple hundred dollar tier range.

    Also, you won’t be forced to go into crappy mono sound mode when on call using Bluetooth headphones. When I use BT headphones with my laptop, I almost always use the integrated mic on the laptop instead of the built in ones in the headphone due to this.




  • Okay.

    First off, afaik, they never advertised “lifetime” warranty nor software support on their website.

    Secondly, as I told you in the previous comment already, you can still use the product as is! This is no different from phone manufacturers dropping software support after 2 or 5+ years. Not to mention this probably only affects hardware that are older than 2009. That’s over 10 years of software support already. Granted they could have reuploaded a version without the AAC codec, but still.

    Third, looking at Via’s AAC FAQ, license fees are due on “per unit” sale, and the term of the license is five years, with additional five years renewal. There never was a lifetime license for it. The same goes for every single hardware/software sold that has AAC encoder/decoder built in. So if your actual issue is with that, take it up on Via and the patent holders, and start using foss audio codecs like OGG Vorbis or FLAC.


  • Well if you’re aware of it, why continue misinforming people with a video he retracted? You’re still using the device as is. They aren’t retroactively deleting functionality off of your device after support ends. The license issue just means that they cannot legally distribute legacy software from their website anymore. AFAIK, Synology emailed their customers informing them ahead of time to download the image before they had to take it down, I think they did what they could have done already.

    The original licensing problem in question was about the AAC codec, which as you probably know, is practically in every device we use and are in use daily. So until another open codec becomes the norm, or until all the patents expire in 2031, there probably will still be cases like this popping up from time to time.