Free codecs without patent issues were limited to things like Vorbis which never got wide support. There were FOSS codecs for patented algorithms, but those had legal issues in places that enforce software patents.

AV1, VP9, and Opus are used on YouTube and Netflix right now.

It's hard to get more mainstream than YouTube and Netflix.

Now, not in 2005.

> which never got wide support

Source? I’ve seen Vorbis used in a whole bunch of places.

Notably, Spotify only used Vorbis for a while (still does, but also includes AAC now, for Apple platforms I think).

Pre-Spotify (and pre-iPod) there were plenty of cheap MP3 players that also supported Ogg Vorbis. I owned one, for example. Obviously MP3 was THE standard, but Vorbis reached a good adoption HW wise (basically because it was free as in beer to implement)

I also owned one but I had to look for it. It certainly wasn’t “widely supported.”

Have a look at audio hardware from 10-15 ago (so long after the mp3 player wave ended in first world countries) but basically everything that plays mp3 plays ogg vorbis as well.

So after it became relevant?

Of course, but this is not what I’d call “never got wide support”.

There is a lot more audio codecs embedded in other things than there ever were personal music players, by orders of magnitude. Vorbis was ubiquitous in video games, for example.

Personal music players had the issue that they had to have MP3 due to market forces, so offering Vorbis didn't save them any money. There were also some design decisions in Vorbis that made it a little more annoying to support on some very limited hardware than MP3.

I couldn’t take my PlayStation to school.

Sure, but you can’t just say “Vorbis wasn’t widely used for music piracy, so it never gained wide support”.

I never said anything about piracy. Plenty of teenagers knew how to rip CDs onto their MP3 players, or had a friend who could do it for them.

I had an MP3 player that did Vorbis.

Responded here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825777