(mp3, not stupid AAC!)Most formats are not actually free. If Nintendo were to add support for non-free video/audio formats, that would raise the price. Let's take MP3, AAC, WMA, and WMV as examples since set prices are easy to find for them.
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
So that's at least $15,000 a year for MP3, plus $0.75 per unit. Reasonable by itself, right?
http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/AAC_fees.cfm
AAC prices are set per-unit and change depending on how many units you choose. Depending on how many nintendo makes this could be a better or worse deal than MP3... then again nintendo sold 6.68 million DSi units as of
last july. There's also the fact that MP3 is ineffecient, you can get more quality with a lower bitrate (and thus lower filesize) in AAC, and AAC's licensing terms (see bottom sentence of this section) could very well be more loose/reasonable.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...sing/Final.aspx
$400,000 a year to
play mono/stereo WMA, $1,000,000 a year if the sound recorder or whatever will be able to save in that format.
$800,000 a year to play surround sound WMA.
WMV? Same deal, $400,000 a year to play, $1,000,000 to encode.
And then of course nintendo has to abide by whatever licensing terms all those companies put forth, so nintendo will be limited by multiple third-party companies as to what it can and cannot do
with it's own system. Nintendo doesn't like any part of that, understandably so.
QUOTE(davidsl_128 @ Apr 4 2010, 10:37 PM) +1 to more strict quality benchmark from Nintendo, maybe we'll get less bad games
