Slashdot Mirror

And how would that have been difficult/impossible with the BSD license, rather than the GPL?

When I see that happen than I would believe it. But basically it is same case as with kernel: ground of conflict of different vendors. Balance of proper support of standards and compatibility with existing HTML base is tricky thing.

At moment two open source toolkits exist - kHTML & Mozilla Gecko - and they are both (L)GPLd. Again supporting my original (great grand parent) post: for the situations (L)GPL is better.

Vorbis is intended to be implemented in hardware: attaching any kind of license is hurdle.

If that was the case, they would have left libVorbis GPL'd, and just BSD licensed Tremor. They did not.

And how many vendors can commit???

Many.

Yes, and I'll add that vorbis has superior sound quality. mp3 degrades rapidly when you go below 128kpbs while vorbis is still very good at 96kbps. To get transparent sound out of the mp3 format, some people feel they have to push the bitrate all the way up to 320kbps. With that high a bitrate, might as well just use FLAC. For most music, vorbis achieves transparency at 192kpbs.

I keep an eye on http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware . Next time I get a car radio, I'd like one with an input jack but without a CD player. Take some of the complexity and expense out of the car radio and let the portable music player handle the decoding and reading of media be that from a CD, or flash memory or a mini HD. I'd like the car radio to be like a home stereo amp and tuner and nothing more. So far, I haven't seen anything that fits.

The folks at Xiph have had a similar offer for a few years:

I don't know if anyone ever took them up on it. Ogg support in portable hardware has come a long way since then. I used to come back to this page every couple of weeks to see if anything had changed. Now a lot of players have it... I hope this takes off.

The folks at Xiph have had a similar offer for a few years:

I don't know if anyone ever took them up on it. Ogg support in portable hardware has come a long way since then. I used to come back to this page every couple of weeks to see if anything had changed. Now a lot of players have it... I hope this takes off.

Has cdparanoia stopped working? I've ripped dozens of DRM-"protected" CDs without a hicupp. Works on CDs ranging from physical defects to Sony BMG.

The most recent Windows Video, RealVideo, and Sorenson video (Used by QuickTime prior to H.264) are what I might call proprietary in that there is no public standard. They are likely covered by patents as well. MPEG-4's AVC or H.264 may be publically documented but is covered by patents which put free software implementations in the same legal mud as any proprietary codec. On the audio side, MP3 and AAC are in similar situations: publically available but patented.

For publically available and unpatented codecs, as far as I know we've got MPEG-1 video and MPEG-1 Layer II audio (MP2), and this only because they are so old that patents have expired. Vorbis is a modern unpatented audio codec, and Theora is covered by patents which have been freely licensed to the public making it effectively patent free.

MPEG-1 suffers because it simply isn't as good in a quality vs. bitrate sense as the modern video codecs. It's possible that bandwidth and disk size increases could this help somewhat. MPEG-1 is also only good at resolutions near or below 352x240, even from higher resolution source material. However, MPEG-1 remains the most likely to be playable on a given computer. The one additional advantage it has is that decoding may be less CPU intensive than, say, H.264.

Ogg Theora with Vorbis audio is nice, and competitive with though inferior to other modern codecs in terms of quality vs. bitrate. Like all the Xiph codecs, Theora suffers from obscurity. Version 1 is not officially released, but there are limited tools for playback but little for encoding Theora. Xiph's QuickTime Components recently added Theora playback to the QuickTime system (Mac and Windows). Some Theora filters for DirectShow (Windows Media) support playback and, for the intrepid, encoding.Due to differences between the Ogg container format and other established containers, it has had some trouble properly interfacing with DirectShow for example, but playback does work fairly well. Real's Helix system (Helix Player for Linux, RealPlayer 10 on Windows) also has plugins for Theora playback and encoding.

As an occasional dabbler in filmmaking, I release my videos in Ogg Theora+Vorbis and MPEG-1 Video+MP2 audio. I have released versions using MPEG-4 ASP video (DivX, XviD, ffmpeg's mpeg4) and MP3 audio, yet I lack the necessary patent licenses for that and am somewhat reluctant to do so. Commercial software such as DivX typically extends its patent license to its customers for various uses (I believe Microsoft does not allow commercial use of Windows Media Video by default).

I've ripped audio tracks via the two different DVD drives in my PC, and they came out very slightly differently.

The CDParanoia FAQ explains this.

Basically, you cannot seek accurately on an audio CD - you can ask to seek to a specific frame and the player will land you somewhere in that frame, but not necessarily at the beginning. So 2 rips of the same track may be absolutely identical except for the fact that one starts a few samples earlier than the other. To compare them you would have to align the tracks against each other and trim them to the same length.

there are no working Theora VFW plugins

NO video editing software supports it

and finally

no streaming server for Theora

Theora.

WMA, the worst of the bunch

Well, it's bad, but not the worst. Check out Xiph's comparison page and you'll probably find that the Real player is about as bad, and Yamaha's VQF is even worse.

But yeah, Vorbis just completely rocks.

Ogg quicktime components for OS X http://xiph.org/quicktime/

Allows playback within iTunes...

If Apple really had nothing against free formats, then the iPod and iTunes would play Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and FLAC formats. I know that some of the current iPods are capable of doing Vorbis and FLAC so why don't they add the feature as part of the next bi-monthly iPod Updater.

As for iTunes? Well there is no excuse for them not to officially include support. They could even just use this package if they are lazy. I honestly don't see why they don't officially include it. I mean there was a recent update for Garage Band that was 25MB just to include support for Aperature 1.5; can't iTunes have another 1.6MB of somewhat useful bloat?

Apple, I and many other people are your market for the iTV. Make sure that you include support for free codecs.

Yes there is. You just install the Quicktime Plugins. They let any QuickTime-enabled application (practically anything on OS X) play ogg/vorbis, ogg/FLAC. I don't know if it supports Theora, since I always play video files in VLC.

Isn't this what those Xiph people were trying to work on?

Who told you that? There are plenty:

FLAC players

Vorbis players

• previous appreciation of MP3 causes self-identification with MP3
  
• investment in personal MP3 infrastructure demands that other answers be wrong
  
• worry at being "wrong" increases bitter backlash against I-told-you-so's
  

Given that Ogg Vorbis is open, I am sure that a lot of good players exist for Linux, and most of them are free.

For Windows and Mac, there is iTunes, which is free and will play Ogg when provided with the right Codec (I use this).

First of all, Theora is a codec; Ogg and AVI are containers. ("MPEG-4" includes both.) Second, Theora and Ogg are "more open" because they're not patented. The MPEG-4 tools you're citing either license the patents or are illegal.

In fact, not only are Xiph technologies (including Theora and Ogg) not patented, but they also use a BSD-like license for the reference implementation:

Q. What is the license for Theora?

Theora (and all associated technologies released by the Xiph.org Foundation) is released to the public via a BSD-style license. It is completely free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write Theora software which is compatible with the specification for no charge and without restrictions of any kind.

But it did make me wonder: do all those remedies really help the machine read more bits correctly by repairing the refrective plane, as it is tempting to believe? Or do they simply allow the built in error correction do its job, by blocking the area where the (clear but warped) surface of the sratch would otherwise make the laser lose its tracking?

Sure, why not? http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/

When I was running Xiph.Org, both lilo and Diablo-D3 were spamming people for money. It's why Xiph (at least temporarily) left Freenode. Diablo-D3 waged a campaign against LinuxFund for their donations to Xiph which (did, and still does) created free and useful code for the community.

Matter of fact, back when Freenode had 'Freenode Radio,' I had given them a ton of original music to use. They played it for a while, and then took it off the air 'under mutual agreement with the artist,' which was simply a lie -- My music is public domain. The folks that made this claim were eventually caught, fessed up and apologized for lying to me and people that listened to the station. They sucked at this, too; They played my music long after they claimed to 'take it off the air,' they were just too dumb to look at the ID tags of the files.

Bob and Patrick are in the same boat. They're both useless, they're both stupid, they're both utterly ineffectual.

Don't know what to tell you, really. I don't have time for IRC anymore, but if I did, I wouldn't truck with *either* of those cats. Freenode is a black hole of idiocy, and if you really want to dive into it, go ahead -- Just don't expect logic, reason or honesty to win out over egotistical mania and deception. This may be true of *all* IRC networks, but Freenode is the only one where I've seen this kind of shit go down time and time again.

Freenode may be 'Animal Farm,' though without the Orwellian context. Lilo's just too damn stupid to play Napoleon. It's like a normal farm. Backward Farmer Bob Levin and his flock of sheep.

Here's a few

Truly a shame... especially if the claim of a previous poster is correct "VLC or MPlayer only". Both of these play Ogg Theora for example on Linux, Mac, and Windows. If you're already using a format that doesn't work by default with, say, QuickTime and Windows Media Player, why not go all out and use Theora?

P.S. It looks like the latest version of Xiph's QuickTime Components has preliminary Theora playback. And there have been DirectShow (Windows Media Player) filters for Ogg codecs for some time now.

P.P.S. Anyone know that status of Dirac?

You can get a Quicktime plugin for Windows Media here and a Quicktime plugin for Ogg here. iTunes just calls Quicktime to play all your music, so if Quicktime can play it, so can iTunes. Knock yourself out.

This is probably the reason there is no ... OGG demuxer available for QuickTime.

Except that Linux has cdparanoia that accomplishes the same.

For something which doesn't hard-crash recent versions of Quicktime, you might prefer the official Xiph.Org QuickTime Components. I haven't seen an official Universal build for use on Intel-based Macs, but I'm sure that's just around the corner.

Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes and other QT-based apps. Unfortunately OGG is still second-class citizen in iTunes, but at least it plays.

there are plenty:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

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

Samsung and iRiver have improved by leaps and bounds in this area recently.

You can now get for example the Samsung YP-U1 ogg player, a direct competitor to the iPod Shuffle (that knocks the Shuffle's socks off) for less than $100.

See here for more info on what hardware supports Ogg Vorbis.

There are actually quite a few players. It's not all that hard to find a vorbis-compatible player these days.

Customer: I want to buy a portable player.
Shop-keeper: Oh, there is plenty (all made on the same factory in China). Would you like this one?
Customer: Does it play OGG/VORBIS?
Shop-keeper: I don't know... well, let's see... no. But it plays MP3 and WMA (you know, Windows Media Player creates it easily)!
Customer: No, it does not suit my needs. I better get one from this list, http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers. I need a player, that supports Ogg/Vorbis. Bye.
Another shop-keeper receives profit.

As more people ask, more chinese factories will produce players that support Ogg/Vorbis. A cheap feature, that may affect sells.

I gave to my girl a samsung YPT7Z, tiny (about the size of a lighter) 1G flash, color screen, and she loves it, but the main reason: It can play Ogg/Vorbis files, wich is among the best audio quality for same size of files.

Right now, I think I'd choose an U3 (for it's SNR quality) and they state it works on linux:
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/u3/

But there are aleredy lots of choices:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

AFAIK, there arn't any open-source patent-free standards for video codecs

Well, now you know that the Xiph.org Foundation provides two. Theora is ready now, while Tarkin is a wavelet-based codec of the future.

As far as I know, and I may be wrong here, iTunes will play standard mp3's.

Getting a decent music player that does OGG and normal USB mass transfer is still not cheap or easy. The Xiph list is informative. Iriver players are one of the few ogg players widely available. They don't do USBfs out of the box, and I suspect most "works for sure" players suck that way and you won't find a good cheap player down the street in the US. This leaves you needing to copy your music to mp3 in order to enjoy any of the bazillion cheap portable music players out there but available music managers don't deal with this very well. Even then, finding a player that also works with USBfs is hit and miss.

PDA's running Familiar, OZ or whathave you may provide a better route to music than music players do.

For video? I'd recommend XviD, and not just because I use it almost exclusively, but it creates a compliant MPEG-4 video stream (compresses nicely), which will hopefully be streamable by any player that supports MPEG-4 video.

Xiph is working on a system like the one you describe.
You can find their informal wiki page at http://wiki.xiph.org/IceShare

(IOMega HipZip and your "phantom vorbis firmware", I'm looking at you!)

Neither Windows Media Player or QuickTime support these formats and codecs, so they'd might as well be proprietary. I'm not about to tell users that they have to download VLC to view our content.

CD Paranoia ? what do you mean by securely?

NEVER EVER give any money to a nonprofit foundation of any size. As someone who used to be the CEO of the Xiph.Org Foundation, I can tell you that all of the donations went to the creation of free and useful multimedia projects. If you're not down with that, that's okay, I suppose. I assume you are using a brush that is a little too wide. Emmett

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

The sad thing is that this "DRM" doesn't actually accomplish anything except false description, trespass to chattels bordering on criminal damage, misuse of a computer and aiding and abetting criminal damage and misuse of a computer. And it only manages to rack up that charge sheet under Windows!

Quick way to get around it: boot up a copy of Slax using the cheatcode slax copy2ram, swap the CD, cd into your hard disk {it'll be under /mnt somewhere} and you can then use # cdparanoia -B to rip off the audio tracks with no problem. You can even go
# for i in *wav; do lame -h $i; done
or
# for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done
if you don't care about keeping the wav files.

``Because it takes more CPU to play an ogg (very hard without a floating-point CPU, I understand), vendors still have to go through hoops to support it.''

That's not true and hasn't been true since the Tremor codec was released (and it was created exactly to make it easier to do Vorbis in hardware). FYI: Tremor is an integer-only Vorbis codec.

I think the issue is much rather that vendors won't support the format, because it costs them extra effort and hardly anybody is demanding Vorbis support. Even on Slashdot, many people swear by MP3, or perhaps AAC or FLAC. That kind of goes to show how little mindshare Vorbis has...

There are many uncommercialised amateur music groups out there that produce music licensed under Creative Commons, and very often in the Ogg Vorbis format. Just change your music habits and listen to music produced by artists who prefer to give away their music on the Internet rather than signing up a commercial contract with the recording companies. They are the people who really love their art. There are portable players for Ogg Vorbis files, too, and please avoid MP3 because the patent holder requests money from developers of MP3 encoding/decoding software.

I'm in the same situation. Ogg was/is fine for computer and SqueezeBox play. I've used it for years and I still play what I have in that way. It's the non-computer bound devices that are the problem for me. An earlier reply to your post noted the iRiver offerings that play Ogg (which I've considered), and there are many others as well. Unfortunately, I've not yet found a portable player (let alone an in-dash car player) that meets all of my other (admittedly strict) requirements. I've sent many emails over the last couple years to various companies urging them to support the format (or one of my other requirements) in the hope that others were as well, to no avail.

So I've given up, but just for the moment. I'm in the process of re-ripping my collection as both low quality/filesize MP3 (for the car/portable) and FLAC. If a player comes along in the future that supports what I want, allowing me to encode even lower filesize (but equal quality) OGGs, I'll just write a script to do so using all my FLACs as a source.

In fact, are there *any* portable music players out there that support OGG? God knows there should be!

Seems like you should have taken a look at this page before you wasted your money on an iPod.