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I agree that iTunes has a bunch of features that the other players don't have that are more important than the "missing" features he listed. But one might also point out that iTunes isn't even really missing these features.

It's missing, extensions, monitor folders, and themes?

Then how come I'm listening to an Ogg Vorbis file in iTunes via xiph, while watching it in the Ultragroovalicious iTunes Visualizer?

Re: watch folders- OSX has folder actions, and comes with Automator. Making a watch folder for any application is trivial. It took me less than 30 seconds to turn a random folder into an iTunes watch folder. You can make as many of them as you want for as many applications as you want in seconds.

And you may want to explain the fact that iTunes doesn't have themes to some of the guys who write iTunes themes?

OK, on the last count, it's not fully them-able and there aren't many themes out there, but seriously, this is OSX. User interface consistency is (supposedly) a hallmark of the platform- hardly anything has skins, instead they have standard looks and user-interface guidelines, and that's supposed to be a feature.

Solution to a non-existent problem? The gaming world seems to disagree, since Ogg is used in plenty of games.

The patent free status of Theora can change overnight if Apple gives native support to it.

On the other hand, Apple doesn't stop them or anyone to code a good quicktime component which will support both encoding and decoding.

It is already there: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

Quicktime framework and codec architecture are so powerful that MS relies them for WMV playback on entire OS X scene.

<video src="my_video.ogg">

This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:

<video>
<source type="video/ogg" src="mymovie.ogg" />
<source type="video/x-flv" src="mymovie.flv" />
</video>

Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:

<video roe="my_roe_file.xml">

(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one

I recall reading somewhere that iTunes is essentially an xml parser/browser and the actual work is done by Quicktime.

This is essentially true. iTunes has extra hooks for officially-supported formats like MP3 and AAC that allow features like the Visualizer to work (the screen-saver/oscilloscope thing), but it will play any audio or video format supported by QuickTime. If you want to play .ogg files in iTunes, just install a plugin for QuickTime that adds .ogg support, and any application that uses QuickTime (including iTunes) will be able to play .ogg files (but the iTunes visualizer won't work).

iTunes has plenty of other features besides buying and playing music: ripping CDs, burning CDs, managing your media library, playing Internet radio, downloading Podcasts, managing iPods and iPhones (including synchronizing media and data and installing applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch), etc. etc.

I'm a Safari fan - but sneaking installs of it in? That makes it - what? - bloatware?

People bitched, and Apple fixed it. Apple Software Update for Windows now informs you that Safari is available, but clearly separates it from the available updates. I agree that this was a crappy thing to do.

Until it has been tested in court no major company will actually use these formats.

O RLY?

Is Blizzard a "major company?" How about Id? Or Rockstar? Or Ubisoft? Or EA? Or the U.S. Army?

Not to mention that Theora and Vorbis are only used by a very tiny sliver of the population.

Actually, Vorbis is used for a lot of game audio. So it's out there; it's just not very visible. And that's not just Free Software games made by "zealots," either: that list includes lots of A-list titles like the Unreal Tournament series, Rock Band, World of Warcraft, GTA: San Andreas, etc.

The reason Vorbis hasn't taken off for music is the same as for every other format: it's not MP3. Even AAC and WMA have only achieved a modicum of success, and that's only because Apple and Microsoft have been pushing them hard as vehicles for their DRM, forcing them to be the only formats you can legally download stuff in, etc.

The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?

Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?

This is the webpage of the author, copyright holder, inventor and owner of both the vorbis codec and the ogg wrapper format:
http://xiph.org/

Right there on the very front, it says this:
"The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation dedicated to protecting the foundations of Internet multimedia from control by private interests. Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets."

What are you thinking about that position is going to challenged in court, exactly, and who would do it?

What exactly is there to challenge?

- The idea itself of a codec has heaps of prior art.

- No other codec is the same format.

- The code is open source and hence can prove its copyright heritage.

Dirac is owned by the BBC itself. The BBC get to say if it is open or not.

cdparanoia does not take advantage of the advanced drive features. Among other things, I think EAC checks CRCs. Anyway, Paranoia IV will be great when it's released. It just needs to be developed first.

At least there are some portals which offer ogg support so artists can upload ogg vorbis files, for example mp3.de even though the name might suggest otherwise.

And there are already free quicktime components for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora which Apple would just have to ship by default to add support - and they've been around for years (they already were around when I switched on to GNU/Linux).

- http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

... because audio CDs are not a random-access medium. They are designed for sequential access, and presume that synchronization may be lost for very brief periods of time. When sync is lost, the missing data can sometimes be recreated on-the-fly from other data.

The point of a CD is to create the impression of continuous sound, not to faithfully transfer binary information. See the CDDA Paranoia FAQ for a better explanation than mine.

??

http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/stereo.html - there is joint stereo support in OGG.

OGG format also has 5.1 support but I have not seen it 'in the wild'.

• Patent and royalty free (the BBC worked very hard at this)
• GPLv2, LGPL, MIT or MPL licensed reference implementation
• Finished: the bitstream has been frozen, etc. Integration with container formats isn't quite there though.
• Better than h.264

NIH, perhaps? Too many bored engineers?

That's one way of doing it. Another is with XML as specified by Xiph.

First of all he did not say that he would not buy a portable media player. Just not the iPod.

If one searches for "ogg players" they will get a great list.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

Very easy. Perhaps he did just that. I did.

2008 should see millions of people playing back ogg theora videos in their browsers. While its not going to replace flash anytime soon it will begin to show up in many free software CMSs and begin to break down one of the last proprietary technologies in the web platform.

2008 should see millions of people playing back ogg theora videos in their browsers. While its not going to replace flash anytime soon it will begin to show up in many free software CMSs and begin to break down one of the last proprietary technologies in the web platform.

I have to provide multiple formats because it's hard for users to find the right codecs to be able to consume my media.

I don't see the issue: whenever I visit a website with a flash thingy, I see a message inviting me to download the flash player from the Adobe/Macromedia site, not the website itself. Surely you could make something like that where it directs the user to a site where royalty-free and non-patent-encumbered codecs can be downloaded for Ogg/Theora (xiph.org perhaps, if they have the bandwidth).

The point is that unlike WMV etc., codecs for all the most used platforms and architectures can be written for Ogg/Theora.

I realize MPEG-4 is a standard but I thought that even though it was licensed R.a.n.D, it was not *free* (as in beer) to implement; please correct me if I'm wrong.

Holy crap, for someone with such a low id you are soooo clueless
http://xiph.org/ogg/ has "The Ogg container format" as the first headline.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions addresses your other bumfoolery.

r00t, you've been p0wned.

Holy crap, for someone with such a low id you are soooo clueless
http://xiph.org/ogg/ has "The Ogg container format" as the first headline.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions addresses your other bumfoolery.

r00t, you've been p0wned.

Which is pretty much exactly what they've done. Official registration of the new MIME types and extensions may take longer though.

They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution...

This is incorrect. Vorbis has shipped tens of millions of units in products by organizations such as, well, Microsoft, to pick an example well known as being uninteresting to patent trolls.

Theora has been in a few games, and other commercial products, but hasn't had the same exposure.

iRiver's players support ogg vorbis

iRiver's players support ogg vorbis

Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes or producing Ogg Theora with iMovie.

Fully documentable nothin'! Theora and Vorbis are fully documented. If you can't figure out how to make your own implementation from the docs and/or by studying one of the many existing implementations out there, you need to turn in your geek card and just forget about developing software.

Proprietary would imply that independent implementations cannot be made or cannot be made easily without violating patents or reverse engineering or whatever. Vorbis and Theora are nothing of the sort -- they are fully open and unencumbered.

I installed this but never really use iTunes for anything except syncing my Audio books to my iPod, but here:
Xiph.Org QuickTime Components. Should do the trick.
HTH :)

so, tell me how i can get this free codec for my ipod/car stereo/dvd player/toothbrush? oh, whats that? I cant? I need to buy new hardware? well shit, perhaps this aint so different to the betamax/vhs thing after all

so, tell me how i can get this free codec for my ipod/car stereo/dvd player/toothbrush? oh, whats that? I cant? I need to buy new hardware? well shit, perhaps this aint so different to the betamax/vhs thing after all

Yes, MP3 is popular, but that doesn't mean that distros should be putting themselves in a legally risky position in order to support it. Ogg is slowly gaining popularity; it didn't reach the immediate success of MP3 because it arrived to the party late.

Well someone (P. T. Barnum?) said there's a sucker born every minute. Presumably some of them buy that thing.

Anyway, if you do have a scratched-up CD, there's CDParanoia - http://xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html

And again, what the RIAA-members want is to eliminate the CD and replace it with a new proprietary format that can't be copied and requires one to buy additional copies for each device you might want to listen on. And they'd love to give extra points for a system that let them count and charge for every time you listen. Grand Prize for a way to bill you if you even hum one of "their" songs to yourself or in your head. What they don't give a damn about is wether its digital or analog, or wether anyone wants to pay for it that way. They figure if they can eliminate everything else, the herd will just go along with the only choice they make available.

As far as the scratches go, any competenct CD-ripping program will utterly ignore most defects in an audio CD.

Xiph.org disagrees.

Something like 4 years behind schedule in even releasing a BETA version of the software, let alone a final 1.0 version.

h.264 is an open and decidedly non-proprietary codec.

And you're a fool.

Quicktime plugins for the ogg vorbis and theora formats, for both Mac and Windows, are available from Xiph: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

For Windows users who'd rather use an existing player than install VLC, try the DirectShow filters: http://free-codecs.com/download/Filters_for_Ogg_Vo rbis_Speex_Theora_and_FLAC.htm

I guess they'd use Theora over RTP (draft RFC) although I'm not sure how well implemented that is (even in clients that support Ogg Theora).

Are you running the MTP or UMS firmware on your YP-T9? There's no easy way to tell on the device, it just shows the firmware rev number, but if you bought it in North America or Europe, and haven't updated the firmware, odds are it's the MTP firmware. Either way, you probably want to be running 1.60 or better (my wife's T9 is on 1.67, mine's on 1.68). You can use libmtp (or Windows) to load new firmware (download from Samsung - the UMS version works fine in place of the MTP version -- see the discussion on the xiph wiki for details).

SVI files are (as far as I can tell) just AVI files with specific settings: 208 x 176 at 15 fps, XviD codec, 44.1kHz MP3 audio. Mplayer plays SVI files just fine. I haven't yet transcoded anything to SVI format, I've only had my T9 about a week. (And figuring out all the arguments to get mplayer/mencoder to do the transcoding is no small task!)

I also have a Samsung. It's a Samsung Yepp (YP-U2J I think-- I know the 'U' is in there and think 'U' stands for US). I got it because that was the only one I could find locally that can do Ogg Vorbis. And that only after flashing the player with a European ROM. (Details on how to flash the Yepp are here.) The flash was also necessary to get it to behave like a USB memory stick. Without that ROM update, I could not move files (Ogg Vorbis or MP3 or whatever) on and off it just like it was a plain old flash drive.

The problem is the politics in the music player, not the music player per se, and not Linux. Most of them won't play nice with USB. They're programmed to support only this Windows protocol, MTP. Don't know enough about MTP itself to know for sure if it's good, or free, but MTP comes from MS and supports DRM, and that's enough for me. Also, I read a rumor at the link I gave above that MS has done much to make Ogg Vorbis unavailable in the US.

Theora is a patent-free, royalty-free open-source video codec. It's the video counterpart to the Vorbis audio codec and competitor to MPEG4 and WMV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
http://xiph.org/

Without a complete specification, the BSD code will not help someone much if they need to implement the codec in silicon via an FPGA.

THEY HAVE A COMPLETE SPECIFICATION, YOU MORON!

Without a complete specification, the BSD code will not help someone much if they need to implement the codec in silicon via an FPGA.

THEY HAVE A COMPLETE SPECIFICATION, YOU MORON!

Without a complete specification, the BSD code will not help someone much if they need to implement the codec in silicon via an FPGA.

THEY HAVE A COMPLETE SPECIFICATION, YOU MORON!

Without a complete specification, the BSD code will not help someone much if they need to implement the codec in silicon via an FPGA.

THEY HAVE A COMPLETE SPECIFICATION, YOU MORON!

Ogg is a completely open format. Ogg is the encapsulation format used for vorbis audio. Ogg is fully documented in RFC 3533. Similarly, the Vorbis specification is also readily available. It is unencombered by patents and the source code to the reference libraries is available under a BSD-like license and is free to use in both commercial and open-source software. RFC's are about as official as you can get for an open standard.

Ogg is a completely open format. Ogg is the encapsulation format used for vorbis audio. Ogg is fully documented in RFC 3533. Similarly, the Vorbis specification is also readily available. It is unencombered by patents and the source code to the reference libraries is available under a BSD-like license and is free to use in both commercial and open-source software. RFC's are about as official as you can get for an open standard.