> IMBE is proprietary and the holder of the rights, DVSI, is very very > very unwilling to share. You can try to license it from them, but > experience has shown that they are not interested.
According to: http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=IMBE the IMBE codec is patented, and here's the patent number: US 5,870,405. Which means you are free to read it and understand it, and maybe even implement it yourself to make sure you know how it works. And if you live in a country without software patents, then you can probably even distribute the software. I've also read that a bunch of radios that use IMBE are *not* interoperable with each other. Perhaps the company tweaks the format for different customers to avoid easy interoperability. So after reading the patent and writing some code and recording some over-the-air traffic, you might still need to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out exactly which bits go where in the signal. That is, they might have some "trade secrets" in addition to the patent. The fun of trade secrets is that once somebody figures them out without violating any contract or law, they get no legal protection. But that's the fun of having a "protocol analyzer" for the radio spectrum -- the high and mighty can't just wave their hand and say "proprietary, proprietary" and leave you stuck. If they transmit a signal, you can receive it in high resolution, and your mind and your software can noodle about how to make sense of it -- whether the manufacturer likes it or not. John _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
