Orban/CRL said its Windows Media Plug-in for the Coding Technologies HE-AAC/aacPlus v2 audio codec surpassed 2 million downloads in less than two years.
The company’s Greg Ogonowski says the biggest users are in emerging IP markets where bandwidth is limited, like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, though North American use is on the rise because of increased reliability.
“The plug-in has been credited with helping to improve sales for Orban’s PC Product Division and has succeeded in putting Orban’s name on desktops all over the world,” the company stated in its announcement.
The plug-in is a free Microsoft DirectShow component. It enables AAC/HE-AAC/aacPlus audio files and streams within Windows Media Player.
“Standardized as MPEG4 HE-AAC v2, aacPlus v2 is a superset of the AAC codec. HE-AAC v2 uses Coding Technologies’ Spectral Band Replication (SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) audio compression technologies to provide CD-quality audio in a footprint four to six times smaller than content encoded with MP3 (MPEG Layer-3) technology.”