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Comment by heywire | Hacker News Reader

Some more information (I posted this yesterday but it didn't get much traction). I'm personally really happy about this project, because something about proprietary technology being used for general radio broadcasts rubs me the wrong way. I really wish we would have adopted a system like DRM (digital radio mondiale, not digital rights management) instead of the deceivingly named HD Radio.

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/decoding-and-listening-to-hd-radio-nr...

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I agree, but wouldn't there be legal/licensing issues with this implementation?

I'm sure there are, but I would put it in the same bucket as the MP3 decoding libraries that have been included in Linux distros behind a checkbox for ages. If you tried to ship a product in the US based on this, I would expect to spend some time getting to know your lawyer. But for personal use, I wouldn't expect any trouble.

Not exactly the same situation as Ubuntu - the MP3 decoding checkbox downloaded Fluendo's decoder, which was actually properly licensed. But otherwise you're correct (FYI, there are EU and JP patents too).

Ah, good to know. Not sure where I got the idea that it was basically an "I live somewhere without those patents" checkbox.

I have always hated HD Radio from the pedantic standpoint that "definition" describes images and "fidelity" should describes audio.

They never said it was "high definition".

The codec is HDC, High-Definition Coding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Coding

OTOH, using HF would be easy to confuse with high frequency.

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