Slashdot Mirror

There was a bit of discussion on this topic on Vorbis-dev not long ago. Worth a read if you're considering this.

What you're asking for is called multicasting, and unfortunately either requires IP tunneling or hardware support every step of the way. Some IPv4 ISPs support it (starband claims to, for instance) but most don't bother to.

As with most optional technologies, until a critical mass is reached, noone's going to bother to support it.

Fortunately, multicasting is one of the requirements for IPv6 compliance. Of course, since IPv6 is itself currently considered another of those "optional technologies", for now people who really want this tend to roll their own.

If you want to help, do so! People are obviously already throwing ideas around... for example, a quick websearch turned up a draft
RTP ogg payload spec, for multicasting ogg streams.

I hope someone from NPR is reading this, too :)

Sure, but I hope that Microsoft or Real isn't. The two formats they support aren't free an any sense.

If you truely want to promote a format that you could count on in the future, write to the BBC telling them the honest truth about the streams. Don't lie, but also explain your somewhat interest in a widely used open source music compression format [codec].

I really do want to store my entire music collection on CDs - but not a standard audio cd format. MP3 would be good, but it's large and isn't free, although mo'free than WMA and RA. Being able to add a folder to my CD containing the source [or latest CVS mainline] lets me feel safe that later on down the road I may be able to play those songs.

I don't care if P2P systems don't want to support it - I just want it to be continually developed.

Qt is available under GPL for X11/Unix and for commercial licensing for X11/Unix, MacOS and Windows. Anyone could actually port the X11/Unix version to Windows, but noone have, AFAIK.

Or release it under a BSD license like Ogg! The codec will get more widespread use, but it will be harder to make any money from it.

Maybe the Ogg Tarkin crew would be interested. I know they've talked about integrating VP3 and I'm sure any ideas or code that could be used from this codec would help the project.

If you're codec is patent free, the people over at the ogg multimedia project would be bigtime interested. They've got the audio portion (vorbis) well along but they're still aways away from having their video portion (tarkin) completed. Head over here for more info

*cough* apago and Cliff, why not use Ogg Vorbis?

They have said repeatedly that they meant the license to give an exception for additional formats (both for encoding and decoding) as long as VP3 was still supported ... they have said however that they would make the license clearer on this point.

"4. Derived works must continue to support VP3, but they can support other formats too. The license will be changed to make this clear."

Check the message here

and how does Ogg Tarkin fit into all of this, now that there is an 'open source' codec?

Well, Ogg Tarkin codec (at code or even specification level) doesn't seem to exist as of yet. =( Last time I checked, they had debate on which "technologies" to use.

I'm not an expert on Ogg things, but I was under the impression Ogg stream format could be used to contain mostly any data, not just Vorbis-encoded audio. (there's some overviews of it...) VP3 for video and Vorbis for sound wrapped into Ogg stream, anyone?

(Not sure how VFW or Qt codec-encoded data can be fitted to the Ogg world...)

I say we specifically look for titles with this sticker, purchase them, give them a whirl in our PCs and see them not play, and return them.

Remember that the first portable MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300, (first announced in September 1998) was entangled in nasty lawsuits, as covered in this slashdot article from 1998.

I daresay these nasty lawsuits contributed to Diamond's demise. None of the consumer electronics companies want to spend the cash battling the recording industry in court, so every one of them toe the line. I'm sure the recording industry has pounded the crap out of several small companies who've tried it -- and when Ogg Vorbis is finalized I'm sure the recording industry will try to pound the crap out of anyone making hardware Vorbis players as "Piracy Devices"

The closest thing I've seen is the Apple Ipod which lets you either store music for listening to, or store files for moving to another PC, but not to listen to the files marked for moving to another PC as far as I know ...

Did you try the obvious solution of encoding without channel coupling, or with lossless channel coupling?

Actually, up until the latest release (RC2), oggenc performed no coupling at all; it just encoded each channel as an independent stream. Nowadays vorbis supports a variety of stereo modes, including two that disable all stereo-separation loss. [Note that stereo modes aren't user-configurable in the released version of oggenc.]

Info at CDDA Paranoia Homepage.

Oh so I get it an audio CD player is analog but a CDROM is digital... Bzzzt.

Well, you're right, but you've missed what's going on:

The audio standard (for CDs) trades longer playing time for reduced ability to absolutely correct errors. (There's less redundant data.) The digital standard (for CD-ROMs) includes more check-data with lower absolute capacity. (You can't get a CD's worth of .WAV files on a CD-ROM.)

The playback/reading methods are also different. When you load a music CD and press play, the resulting digital datastream is routed to an onboard decoder chip which converts the digital audio data to analog and sends it to the drive's audio outputs. The decoding process designed to tolerate all but the most severe errors: First it corrects any errors that it can, then attempts to conceal any errors that it can't correct. Only if the concealment doesn't work does it fail, and then only for a limited time. (A 1/2-second burp on a 79-minute disc shouldn't prevent the rest of the disc from playing.)

When you're reading a data disc, (or when you're using a rip program that reads the audio CD as digital data), you use the drive's internal data-validation routines. With data, you (usually) don't want errors that can't be fixed to be quietly concealed (think tax tables with wrong numbers in them, or a one-byte error in an .EXE), so the drive is set up to choke if it runs into an error that it can't correct.

What the Cactus and related systems try to do is add just enough bad bits to the data stream that CD-ROM drives will choke when reading the disc as data, without adding "detectable" degredation when the same data is processed as digital audio through the audio decoder chip. Problem is, that assumes that all players have the same tolerance for bad data (unlikely), that the all players will react to bad data in the same way (so you can predict what corruption is "safe"), and that all listeners have the same standards for what's "undetectable" (don't make me laugh). Plus the fact that intentionally corrupting the data makes a less robust disc; one more likely to fail if things like fingerprints, scratches, or dirty laser lenses further degrade the signal. Not pretty!

Yes, there should be a way around this. IIRC, cdparanoia does something like what you suggest. I don't think you'd want to implement this at the driver level, though, unless it was coded to allow you to switch the correction routine on and off. Because, as noted above, there are times you need to know that the data's bad and can't be fixed (or has been fudged).
----------
Quality AC posts since 1999.

perhaps using cdparanoia would help?

Sorry about this beinbg a long post, but I've done something similar to what I think you're asking about. I've set up an old Pentium 200 w/Linux 2.2.19, 128MB RAM, Ensoniq sound card, and 120GB of dedicated music storage, with...
(enters command)

thorin:/music$ find . -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' | wc -l
12648

thorin:/music$

...mmm, alot of songs (900+ albums, yes I own all the CDs), organized by alphabetically by Artist/Album/Song. I use Edna(v0.3?) as the music web server to serve the music (hacked slightly to support .ogg files) on a 10/100Mb house LAN. Edna will allow selection of individual songs, pick from existing playlists, or dynamically generate a 'play all songs' playlist that works from the selected level down.
Any user at a client computer on the LAN can use their preferred browser to stream whatever music (album/playlist/song) they want to their local desktop. Windows clients currently are using Winamp, Linux clients are using XMMS, but any client with support for streaming mp3 and ogg files should work.
For MP3s I use ID3V2 tags because they work with streaming. The tags on the .ogg files seem to stream just fine. I use EasyTag to manage the ID3 tags on the MP3s. Of the TAG utilities I tried, I liked it the best for managing large numbers of MP3 files. I haven't yet found a comparable utility for managing OGG TAGs.
On the server itself, I use Konqueror pointed at the local Edna web server to pick playlists handled by XMMS via an Ensoniq sound card to the main stereo system. MP3s are encoded at a relatively high quality using LAME 3.89 in VBR mode with an average bit rate running about 190Kb/s. I'm currently re-encoding the music from the original sources into the ogg/Vorbis" format, using an average bit rate of 192Kb/s. I use GRIP to rip my CDs with (with full paranoia), and normalize to even out the volume variations of songs so that playlists with songs taken from different albums aren't at radically different volumes. There is a volume normalizing plugin for XMMS that adjusts the level in real time, but I didn't like the way it worked. The volume level of the next song was significantly different (louder) than the previous song, it could take a half second or so to adjust itself. Pre-normalizing (with conservative values) seems to work much better. The music currently occupies about 70GB of disk space.

BTW, my music server is what I use to rip/encode all of the new music, run setiathome, and function as a SAMBA file server/domain controller. It will do all that while streaming music to several clients as well as play through the local sound card without skipping. I discovered that if I used XMMS to read the MP3/OGG files directly from disk (on the server), I had problems with skipping when the server was heavily loaded, even with the XMMS buffers set to very high values, but clients on the LAN would never skip. Streaming to XMMS on the server solved that problem without resorting to the low latency patches for the kernel. On the Linux clients I setting my browser to launch xmms with the -e option which causes new songs or playlists selected with the browser to be appended to the current xmms playlist. ;-)

Join the already-under-way development of Ogg Tarkin (scroll down).

looks nice, but when are iTunes and iPod going to support a real encoding format?

BTW, for more in depth discussion that has been ongoing, have a look at the forums at r3mix.net and the Ogg-specific forums at Hydrogen Audio. I keep up with both forums, and the folks there tend to make prerelease build binaries available for people to play with. For up-to-date detailed information without the overhead of the Vorbis-dev list, those are the places to go.

One more link for folks who want to know more: The beginning of the document describing Vorbis stereo discusses good terminology and qualification of subjective fidelity. It's nothing new to most posters I expect, but it might help keep the discussion consistent.

Happy hacking,

Monty
xiph.org

BTW, for more in depth discussion that has been ongoing, have a look at the forums at r3mix.net and the Ogg-specific forums at Hydrogen Audio. I keep up with both forums, and the folks there tend to make prerelease build binaries available for people to play with. For up-to-date detailed information without the overhead of the Vorbis-dev list, those are the places to go.

One more link for folks who want to know more: The beginning of the document describing Vorbis stereo discusses good terminology and qualification of subjective fidelity. It's nothing new to most posters I expect, but it might help keep the discussion consistent.

Happy hacking,

Monty
xiph.org

Now the tools are available in a Debian Package so I don't need to build them from the source anymore.

If you just want to rip some tracks for your home system, ogg is particularly nice on linux systems. The sound quality is excellent and the tools are relatively easy to use. Combine these with CD Paranoia and it is easy to make great backups of your cd music. I figure that the ogg vorbis developers have worked very hard for a long time on the project and they deserve for people to use and enjoy the fruits of their labors :-)

Actually, the primary objection to Mp3 is not the compression. Rather, it is the licensing issues surrounding Mp3.

Read all about it at http://www.xiph.org/about.html.

Daniel

f you think it's wrong to have to pay to access video files then, heck, I'm sympathetic, but the only way you're going to be able to avoid it is if folks help to support projects like Ogg Tarkin.

Free software is something you give, not something you can take. If the CodeWeavers folks have done good work, there's not a thing in the world wrong with them charging for it.

What needs emphasizing is that the standards we use to communicate must be in the public domain. If not, if an industry standard controlled by a company becomes widespread, the company can put in such clauses in effectively prohibit certain unwanted kinds of speech, typically we will see first speech that critizes the company.

Now, mark that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically grants the right to express yourself in any medium. If, say one company owns an industry standard that is the only way to communicate by speech, this human right does no longer exist.

That is why Ogg is so important. It will make a standard for the public domain, and this standard is the only thing that saves free speech in the multimedia age. No Ogg, no free speech.

Similarily, we must make sure that similar bodies, working on other public domain standards, such as the W3C are successful. Without them, we're screwed.

An for those saying that "just don't use FP", well, you see, we all know M$ wants to control these commodity protocols, and M$ hardly cares about a bunch of geeks anyway, so us boycotting M$ doesn't help. Joe Sixpack must understand the problem, cause if he doesn't, they'll win, and turn the web into their network, and make sure FP is the only authoring tool you can use. It'll be the end of free speech too...

Ensuring that the standards are in the public domain is even more important than that software is Free (as in speech).

The wavelet compression of MPEG-4 offers better quality than JPEG with file sizes approximately 25 percent of the size for Web quality.

Wavelets dynamically allow servers to reduce bitmap file sizes (which also affect quality) when working with lower bandwidths, reducing the need to create different presentations to account for a variety of connection speeds.
[...]
A potential barrier to widespread MPEG-4 use are the licensing and fees issues, due to several companies having patents that apply to aspects of MPEG-4.

The wavelet compression of MPEG-4 offers better quality than JPEG with file sizes approximately 25 percent of the size for Web quality.

Wavelets dynamically allow servers to reduce bitmap file sizes (which also affect quality) when working with lower bandwidths, reducing the need to create different presentations to account for a variety of connection speeds.
[...]
A potential barrier to widespread MPEG-4 use are the licensing and fees issues, due to several companies having patents that apply to aspects of MPEG-4.

MPEG-4 is not the panecea everyone seems to think it is. Currently MPEG-4 is heavily patent encumbered ( see http://www.m4if.org/patents/ ). The result is I doubt you will find it possible to produce a legal open source MPEG-4 codec.

The standard is also being put forth by ISO, a notoriusly shitty standards body. Do you want to pony up more than $1,000 to get a copy of the standard so you can begin making a standards compliant implementation? That's roughly what the MPEG-4 standards docs cost. Even if we disregard the patent concerns, this represents a serius barrier to entree for anyone wanting to do an open source implementation of the codec.

ISO ( and it's child the ITU-T ) are designed to be used as weapons by corporate players against each other, not to produce good clean standards that can be used by all.

Try looking at the ogg tarkin project http://www.xiph.org/ogg/index.html as a group trying to pursue a non-patents encumbered video codec with a truely open standard ( I don't consider ISO standards to be open because of the intense barriers to entree like the expense of the standards docs).

...and nobody's mentioned (admittedly still in 'planning' stage) Ogg Tarkin yet? Shocking...

'Course, there doesn't seem to be any actual code yet, while the developers seem to have been busy with Vorbis instead, but it looks like there are interested people working on it, anyway.

I noticed their mailing list archives show some discussion of whether the vp3 codec mentioned in one or two other posts might make an interim codec to use for an Ogg video file format while Tarkin is under development...

Too bad there isn't a video version of Ogg

This is not news, as there are several of these players out right now. I've been in the market for one for about a month. Supply is very limited as is information, so hopefully Philips (yes, one 'l' not two) device will spur more interest. Check out this link for info on the media and players. Unfortunately, most of the ones listed in the article are unavailable or hard to find.

Personally, I find them better than standard MP3 players because for half the money I get 3 times the storage, plus I can swap out disks easily. These things are actually very available. A computer show never goes by where I don't see them. And the size advantage is nice in some cases. I fly a hang glider and I want something small that I don't have to make extra room for in my harness.

Now if only it supports a flash ROM so I can write an ogg vorbis decoder for it.

And, if you read the FAQ, you'll find out that Netrek is exactly where the Ogg part came from. To quote:

An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:

3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."

(see the rest of the definition for the original Netrek usage.)

At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.

Pretty clear evidence that Netrek was the origin of the name.

I don't think there are any un-patented 5.1 channel codecs around.

Actually, if you look at the last answer on the Vorbis FAQ you'll see that Ogg Vorbis already supports encoding of up to 255 channels per stream, so, theoretically at least, it ought to be a cinch to use Vorbis for 5.1 audio.

This could be a real opportunity for Ogg to become the first mainstream audio codec to support 5.1 explicitly. It would be a real leg-up for Ogg's chances if it gets accepted as the choice of audiophiles, and having 5.1 supported before MP3 and WMA can only help with that. Those who have experimented with DVD Audio would finally have a format worth considering for ripping purposes, and it helps that Vorbis sounds very musical.

Vorbis developer Nick D'Amato has a working Quicktime component that lets Quicktime Player, the Quicktime plugin, iTunes, and any other QT app play vorbis files. See this thread from vorbis-dev for details, and download the plugin to help test it out.

6. The Vorbig Fishy ROCKS!

That's actually the Xiph fishy. The Ogg Vorbis logo is this one.

www.xiph.org

Actually, try looking here.

And since open standards is my favorite issue, I support these efforts a lot (though I haven't the knowlegde to participate).

There is a lot of prior art as in MP3 files, but not as in MP3 players and encoders.

Have you noticed the incredible lack of free (both as in Freedom and as in Price) MP3 encoders out there? Do you ever wonder why?

Just take a look at the Ogg Vorbis FAQ. A few years ago, the owners of the MP3 patent came down upon all the "unsanctionned" mp3 encoders out there. This desimated quite a few of the projects since the developers could not pay the licensing fees. Those that have survived have done so only because of legal loopholes, geographic local (sometimes tentitave), or chance.

So the patent holders have done more than "veiled threats"... they've destroyed quite a few projects.

This extends not just to MP3 encoders, but to MP3 decoding libraries. For example, I am an Open-Source/Free-Software "edutainment" developer. In an upcoming title I am working on, I need higher quality audio with smaller file sizes (i.e., something like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis). However, this project would be in jeopardy if I did decide to use MP3 over Ogg Vorbis simply because the patent holders of the MP3 format could step in at any time and kill the MP3 libraries I use, kill the MP3 files I use, or even kill my project for using MP3s altogether.

BladeEnc is just a mildly tweaked version of the ISO sample code. If you want to stay with MP3, get a recent version of Lame and you'll be amazed how much better the music will sound at the same bitrate.

I tinkered around with Vorbis, but "ogg123" (clone of mpg123) locked my FreeBSD system up solid when I tried to play a tune--so I scrapped it.

Looking through the Vorbis development archives, I see some reports of (fixed) problems with OpenBSD, but nothing about FreeBSD. Download it again and try it - and if there are still problems, email them a bug report.

• spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- this is something that can obviously only be done on a very individual level.
• spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and other archive material?
• write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones first).
• ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc. to support/include OGG
• ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
• ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
• ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other formats
• ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
• ask the media to include OGG on bundled CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
• encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread their work if they use OGG
• ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
• etc. etc. etc.

If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.

• spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- this is something that can obviously only be done on a very individual level.
• spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and other archive material?
• write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones first).
• ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc. to support/include OGG
• ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
• ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
• ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other formats
• ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
• ask the media to include OGG on bundled CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
• encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread their work if they use OGG
• ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
• etc. etc. etc.

If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.

I think that the DMCA requires that for a circumvention device to be illegal its primary purpose must be circumvention. There already exists a lot of software out there, such as cdparanoia, which was written to interpolate out the errors on CDs and I believe that their primary use has been to do this on normal (i.e., not brain-damaged) CDs. I doubt that the DMCA would make such software illegal as it serves a legitimate purpose in its primary use.

This raises an interesting point, though - wouldn't the music labels intentionally introducing errors onto CDs actually encourage copying? If I purchased a CD with errors on it I would use something like cdparanoia to correct the errors and then save the results on a CD-R as the results would be more resistant to actual errors that arise from scratches and physical jostling while playing in the future (this assumes that I liked the music enough to do this - my first inclination would be to return it for a refund). I would not have needed to make the copy had the CD been normal because the error correction capabilities would have not been degraded already.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the above should not be taken as legal advice.

Too bad the Mac's are so expensive

On the desktop, sure, where you have to compare them to the frankenstein boxes that all us geeks love to build from parts.. but one of those new iBooks would be a fine, fine Linux laptop, if they could just get the audio working. But it's being worked on..

"The Ogg project has nothing to do with the common surname 'Ogg'. Nor is it named after 'Nanny Ogg' from the Terry Pratchett book _Wyrd Sisters_."

What the names mean

-- from http://www.xiph.org/~jack/ibook/thoughts.html

Hmm. Make a PSX Linux system that can play Flash animations, and include Flash animations with the Ogg Vorbis video, and you might have something pretty cool.

steveha

You mean like this maybe?

From the Ogg Vorbis - www site.


---
Decoder 1.0 release candidate 1 (1.0rc1) scheduledfor June 17th, 2001

With good fortune, the fully completed 1.0 decoderwill be in CVS this weekend. This represents completion of the final decoding features missing in beta release 4 that are needed for 1.0. Specifically, this decoder release includes cascading, channel coupling, and sparse codebook support. Aside from bugfixes, no additional changes will be made to decoding through 1.0. This decoder implements all Vorbis 1.0 specification features.
---
:)
Keep up the good work Monty and the rest of the crew!

Ogg Tarkin is a barely-started video codec. The only thing available is a mailing list, but I encourage anyone with the time and knowledge to join the list
------