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Ogg Vorbis - The Free Alternative To MP3
Christopher Montgomery:
Vorbis is a hybrid time/frequency transform coder like mp3, but the similarity really ends there; it's more similar to TwinVQ in some ways (many shared mechanisms, albeit used somewhat differently).
Like mp3 (and virtually every other useful transform coder), we first look for strong changes and natural breaks in the input audio, and can use this information to break up the incoming audio into different sized blocks. When you lose information in the frequency domain, the resulting noise spreads throughout the time domain. A very strong spike in time will get smoothed out by frequency quantization, so the larger the block, the more audible it is. You want to isolate these strong, sharp events in smaller blocks.
Past this point, the similarities with mp3 end. Vorbis can do a time-domain pre-encoding using wavelets to further reduce spreading of time events and non-tone data. The current libvorbis doesn't have the code to do this yet, but the hooks are there for when we do finish this code (this feature will be post 1.0. Wavelets are still something novel that no one else is using in serious production yet, and we need to do more real R&D before it's ready).
Vorbis takes the time data directly to the frequency domain with an MDCT, where mp3 first subbands the data. The polyphase pseudo-QMF filter that mp3 uses for subbanding is not completely orthogonal; no matter how good the implementation, there will always be some aliasing. For this reason, Vorbis dispenses with subbanding altogether and just uses a large MDCT.
Vorbis then computes line-by-line masking curves for local peaks, long-distance simultaneous tone masking, simultaneous noise masking and temporal masking. These curves are use to separate inaudible tones from audible tones, and then choose a frequency domain amplitude curve that represents the 'base energy' of that audio frame. The base energy curve (I call it a floor) is subtracted from the MDCT data (like a whitening filter), which produces 'frequency residue'. The floor is converted to an LSP (line spectral pair) representation and then it and the MDCT residue are vector quantized into the final output codewords by a cascade of custom VQ codebooks that are packed along in the header of the bitstream. The result is one vorbis audio packet.
The audio packet is them embedded into an Ogg bitstream page and the page (when full of packets) is shipped out in the stream.
The decode side does the reverse, but without all the masking analysis. We extract the string of packets from the Ogg bitstream, and for each packet unpack the floor and residue, take the dot product and then do an inverse MDCT to recover the time-audio frame. Each frame is lapped and added to the previous frames and we get the original audio out.
Very simple, see? :-) To be fair, the masking analysis is the only real black magic. What I'm doing is almost entirely based on the masking curve data published in the late 50's by Robert Ehmer.
One thing the current release of Vorbis does not have is channel coupling (like mid-side stereo, although we'll be doing it differently). Beta 1 and beta 2 actually include multiple totally separate channels. The fact that we equal and better mp3's quality missing this huge piece is exciting. Mid/side stereo in mp3 drops the final bitrate of a stereo stream by 30-50kbps. To get a real comparison of Vorbis vs. mp3, compare mono streams or force the mp3 encoder not to use joint/intensity stereo (eg, -m m in LAME 3.84). Vorbis at 56kbps mono beats mp3 at 80kbps. At equal bitrate there's no comparison at all.
Slashdot:For those just tuning in, what's the project all about, and how did it get started?
The Vorbis codec is a lossy audio compression codec similar to mp3, but we're shooting for better performance (lower bitrates for a given level of quality) as well as keeping it totally Free as in Beer and Speech. I started work on Vorbis a week or two after Fraunhofer sent out 'cease and desist' letters to several free mp3 encoder projects in the fall of '98. At that point, it was clear the worst case was happening; the squeeze was on by commercial entities to not only dominate the legal distribution of music, but the underlying technology as well. A 'free license' to owned technology means nothing (and that's why Real and Windows Media are also worthless as infrastructure to us).
Fraunhofer (and MPEG in general) and the RIAA are also a bit too friendly behind the scenes, if not entirely in bed together. If you really believe SDMI is about protecting the artists, well, I have some wonderful Oklahoma beachfront property for sale at prices that are a steal, but you'd better act fast!
It's ironic that at the same time mp3 has been an agent to open up music distribution, it's becoming a tool for commercial interests to reclaim control. If online music is to fulfill its potential, an oligarchy can't be allowed to control its distribution or the technology behind it. The Internet would not have reached critical mass if it was a product of Microsoft or AOL or Oracle... It wouldn't ever have happened. Corporate control of every facet of online music will just strangle it in the cradle. The inventors of the Internet 'gave it away,' and that's been a great thing for business. However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
We need to have unbreakable free music foundations in place before letting the commercial interests have their way with the infrastructure. I wouldn't rely on any infrastructure they build themselves.
Ogg and Vorbis are trying to continue the principles for which we in the open world see mp3 standing.
Slashdot: What are you working on right now?
Vorbis second beta. General quality improvements, additional bitrate modes in the encoder (96-350kbps stereo, mono modes), bugfixes, etc. After beta 2 (look for on Tuesday at about the time LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose opens), we have low bitrate modes to finish, channel coupling (joint stereo and joint surround) and constant bitrate modes (Vorbis by default is VBR).
Others in the project are working on tools... Mike Smith, Kenneth Arnold and others are knee deep in utils, Jack and Chad of Icecast are adding Ogg streaming to Icecast, Ralph Giles and Rob Kaye are working on stream mixing, metadata streams (Ralph is also hacking on MNG over Ogg). Kim, Tori and Emily at iCast are writing documentation...
The project has also outgrown our group. There are now Vorbis news sites (like govorbis.com and vorbiszone.com), an all-vorbis music label (vorbisonic.com) and other vorbis related sites poppin up. angrycoffee.com is working on Vorbis tutorials for beginners.
Within the core team, we need to get more people who are up on signal processing aspects like in the community around LAME.
Slashdot: Is this your full-time thing?
Yes. Ogg and Vorbis development are sponsored by iCast and they're also deploying it internally. In addition to paying salaries, they're pitching it to the industry and providing legal assistance.
Slashdot: Xiphophorus is a collection of people, projects and tools. What's going on with the collective?
Vorbis is a 'serious' project now, so we're expensing the massive espresso consumption ;-) The few of us who are now getting paid to do this can afford to be extremely intense about it. Other contributors still come and go. Right now, we're all pretty much focused on Ogg Vorbis; I have to apologize to all the cdparanoia users out there. I'll be working on it again in the future, but right now I only have so many cycles.
Ogg and Vorbis are currently getting more outside attention than we can really gracefully handle (well, handle and still get work done at the rate we're used to, which was still always slower than we want ;-) Apparently someone on some list claimed 'Vorbis was dead' because we hadn't updated the Web site in a month. Ha! If we were 'dead' we'd have plenty of time to write HTML :-) And answer mail. Anyone who sent me personally mail in the past month and a half, I'll answer it eventually, I promise...
Slashdot: Are you out to replace mp3 as the sound format of choice? If not, why not, and if so, what are the challenges?
We're out to keep things Free (capital F intentional). If MPEG turned around and made the mp3 spec and patents public domain, we'd definitely declare victory (and then continue coding to improve Vorbis). But we all know that isn't going to happen. More likely, if Fraunhofer decides we're a threat, they'll just delay licensing (remember kids: free licenses to binaries aren't worth jack) until the competition dies down. Then they'll squeeze again.
Honestly, I don't think we're going to 100% replace mp3 (people still use RAR for Christ's sake). I lay better than even odds on us eclipsing mp3 in the next year if the licensing picture stays the same. We also intend to have 80-96 kbps stereo streams that sound better than mp3 128 by that point, so people (and businesses) won't exactly have to give anything up to save money. Also expect hardware support soon, possibly by end of year if things go smoothly.
Slashdot: You talk a lot on your Web site about Open software. Which came first, the desire to deliver multimedia, or the drive to develop it openly?
My real hacking skills germinated at the MIT Lab for Computer Science. I'd coded practically all my life before getting to MIT, but I'd always been the best coder I knew, so I hadn't really learned much. When I got to MIT, I didn't feel stupid but it drove home that I had a lot of catching up to do. Most of my mentors were from the previous generation (all open source people) but a few of the very hardcore people were younger than me, too.
I've been a musician all my life too, albeit not a very good one (I feel a bit like Soliari in Amadeus) and Ogg was born in '93 when I bought a 1 Gig hard drive and a sound card and thought 'this is unlimited space! I can put music on this! And do things with it!'. I quickly found out that a Gig wasn't unlimited by a long shot, not even in '93 (I filled it with mail eventually), so I started muddling with compression. Greg Hudson made an offhand remark about there not being any good, free, music compression libs at the time, and Squish was born. I got a letter from a lawyer a few months later politely informing me that 'Squish' was a registered trademark and if I didn't change the name of my software, I could forget ever owning anything in the Western World ever again. Mike Whitson renamed the codec 'OggSquish'. The Ogg project was born. Oh, and we plan to release an updated Squish codec again sometime in the next year.
does anyone actually think that with the current popularity of MP3s that anything else will take over? unti something much better comes along, MP3 will, IMHO, be the standard.
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
OK, the Motion Picture Experts Group, a non-commercial cooperation of engineers specialising in the field of audio and video compression spend a decade scribbling away and coming up with audio layer one, tweaking it to audio layer two (.mp2) and again tweaking it to audio leyer three (.mp3). If they are experts, why didn't they come up with the same algorithms as these smart eggs, or should that be smart oggs? (possible reason - movie audio differs dynamically from music audio, so the different techniques exploit these differences?) FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I remember hearing all this praise a couple of years ago about VQF files -- all the quality of MP3 files, in much less space. (Or something like that.) Without mainstream support, VQF files quietly went unnoticed. Microsoft now promotes its Windows Media codecs, which deliver very good performance in a very compact file, but suffer from the obvious platform dependence issues. Where does Vorbis stand in all of this? Right now, it looks like just another good idea that will be defeated by good marketing.
For more information, click here.
I don't think it will take that much to win of it really is better. In my (limited) experience .ogg files at highest bitrate sound about as good as their mp3 counterparts, but are about 80-95% the filesize. It might not sound like much of a saving, but some mp3s are quite big and once the 56kbps napster kidz realise they can save money on their phone bills you have crossed the first hurdle.
The only other thing is playing and encoding them.
Thats no big deal though. Anyone can get a one-off winamp plugin download without a problem.
I think the take up might be slow initially, but once we reach critical mass, watch ogg take over the lossy compressed-audio throne. (_if_ that is, it's really better than mp3 as some of us believe it is)
btw, I think any comparison of mp3 vs ogg to gif vs png is flawed. Think about it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
I would expect slashdot to provide URL to informations readily available on the web, it is common pratice today. More information is available from http://www.vorbis.com/
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Vorbis sounds awesome!! The one thing I am most interested in, though, is the ability to have a hardware player, similar to the Genica or Pine models, and my trusty Apex DVD player. People aren't using mp3 just on their computers anymore-- it's moving into "real life", and I suspect the format will have a hard time unless there is real, tangible, non-vapor hardware available.
When we get the first wavelet-enabled version, I would love to see Ars Technica (or somebody else) do an independent technical review of the audio quality vs. mp3 (and maybe vqf, aac, windows media, and whatever else there is...)
The last test I did with my ears, vs LAME 3.84, LAME was easily (subjective) better. I encode everything at 160 stereo, and Ogg just didn't sound as good at the maximum bitrate available.
The LAME team takes extra care in analyzing the output and comparing it the FhG encoder and the previous version of LAME (just in case something broke). How does the Ogg team compare results? Is it with listening tests?
-mark
Fraunhofer (and MPEG in general) and the RIAA are also a bit too friendly behind the scenes, if not entirely in bed together.
There's been no real reason to think that MP3 will be "controlled" by the dark forces of the RIAA. MP3 is VHS, Ogg is Beta (a bit better - but is it worth the switch?), and the only way that it is going to catch on is through scaring people away from MP3. The RIAA is the best bogeyman to come along, so it's no surprise that they're used; and Fraunhofer - well, Germans always scare people, don't they?
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
oh, this is all fine and dandy news on a technical front, but what will this file format come to be known as? How will real people in the real world deal with such a cumbersome name?
.vog files? .vo files? will we say V.O.G. or vog or V.O. or voh? .orb? .vorb? maybe we can all wait for the 5th rev, and call them vo5 files! (refers to a brand of shampoo here in the US)
will they be
The word 'emmpeethree' has a certain flow, a rythym that satisfies. I think it is an important element to the continued success of the mp3 format. The histroy of the mp3 format shows the success is due to being in the right place at the right time, but now that we have an easy, universally understood 'name' to use in mp3, Vog Orbis has its work cut out for it. There'll have to be a catchy abbreviation or truncation before this will move forward.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
What is being done to help with syncing issues? As multi-media gets more widespread, its going to be very useful to have the sound playback systems independent from the graphics but with a losely controled sync signals. One feature that seems to be missing is to be able to say "play the audio frame 3433 to start in exactly 2.1 seconds". Fixed bitrates make that easy but VBR gets to be a real mess unless there is extra info in the audio data.
Remember, Fraunhofer owns the MP3 patents. They can set any licensing terms. They could, for example, do what RSA did with theyr crypto systems, licensing only one controlled implementation for general use, and go after anyone disseminating unlicensed encoders/decoders.
(Sure, you'll be able to find them on the Net, but if RedHat can't legally put them on their CDs, they're in the same twilight zone as arcade ROMs.)
As there is a single point of control for MP3, the RIAA could easily pay Fraunhofer a few billion (or even buy them outright through a front company), and get open MP3 pulled, forcing everybody to upgrade to encrypted SDMI formats.
Owning the patents for a technology you wish to bury can be very powerful. When Macrovision developed the copy protection mechanism embedded in all DVD players, they also created and patented a device for removing the protection. This enables them to sue anyone attempting to sell such a device or distribute the details of constructing one. (Not that it eliminates said information, but it drives it sufficiently underground to keep the ordinary people from seeing it.)
Once Fraunhofer start getting heavy with MP3 licensing, the penguinhead army will adopt Vorbis in a flash, and hopefully so will Windows-using music fans. Then the battle lines shift to hardware players.
is NOT to replace mp3. With the current widespread use of mp3's, I think new codecs stand very little chance of replacing mp3 quickly and completely. The smart way to go about it, is to slowly shift your codec into the market. In this case, I would try to get Ogg-support in WinAmp and the like, and facilitate Ogg-trading on napster and it's peers. If people can transparantly mix their mp3's and oggs, you will get to a point where people are saying:
"Hey, this piece of music is available in both mp3 and ogg format, but oggs are a lot smaller, so I think I'll download that one."
VQF is superior in many ways to mp3, even the encoder will let you encode live streams on the fly (with a fast cpu). Sound quality is much better and files are 30% smaller. How many vqf files have you come across?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
as for me, i plan on investigating it more as soon as i get home today. it sounds (of course) great, we'll see how it
still, just like mp3, it won't be a replacement for CDs.. i haven't downloaded an mp3 in months, actually. i can't play them in my car, and why would i want to? CDs sound better. sure, there's the hassle of switching CDs, but really, with a nice sized disc-changer, that's just a once-a-month switch.
at one time i had 13gigs of mp3s available on my machine. that was over a year ago. right now i have none.
it's useful, but only for songs you don't really care about, you have an urge to hear them, download it, listen to it, and you're done. maybe check out a new album. but songs you care about, ones you want in a collection (i hope i'm speaking for more than myself here), are worth having on CD.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
There's some validity to this point, but at the same time Word Perfect was pretty sure that they were "too embedded into society" to be dethroned as well.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Yeah... vqf got screwed because the standard was closed. It made small files, but the encoder was slow and sucked big-time, and for years, there was no way to skip around in the track. Even now, fast-forward is implemented (apparently) by muting the sound and playing the track as fast as the CPU can handle, and rewinding is done by muting the sound, starting at the beginning of the track, and applying the fast-forward algorithm until you reach the point you want to rewind to. This sort of horrible support will be avoided by Vorbis simply because it will be open. People couldn't write their own stuff to work with vqf, and so the format went to hell in a handbasket. Even if Vorbis doesn't catch on, you can *at least* be assured that you will always have a player you can port to your new OS.
It may not go mainstream, but it will not be defeated like vqf was.
And if we get hardware players, you can bet I'll be moving all my music to vorbis!
So make a WMP codec. And for that codec, and all of the plugins readily available, make very very good installation instructions, or better yet, automatic installation procedures, so that even the shy-est users can do it.
I've got my horse, Bessie. She gets me where I wanna go just fine, why would I wanna buy one of them new-fangled autocarriages?
However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
So, what about Delphi - designed and maintained by a single company for purely commercial interests? It has an elegent design which accepts new features as required, and has been updated over the years to fit new ideas without sacrificing backwards compatability or elegence.
And then there's C++ - a similar language that, whilst undoubtedly powerful, is maintained by a standards body which means that updating the langauge is a task with a duration measured in years.
Not all things under corporate control turn out poorly. HTML is not a good example.
The SGS-Thomson MP3 decoder is really a VLIW DSP with the MP3 decoder in ROM. Early version (perhaps current versions) actually required a firmware patch loaded into RAM before they'd produce good results.
This DSP is available as a standard supported component, not only as an MP3 decoder. It's therefore quite possible for developers to write a Vorbis decoder for it even without hardware manufacturer support.
I don't think it's the only low-power DSP available that's capable of this sort of job, so some other semi-custom design is quite possible.
Furthermore, if this new format prooves to have better quality for lower bitrates then there is an additional incentive to use it. Even if it didn't people don't really have a loyalty to Codecs. People talk about MP3's because that's the only tech out there right now that provides the quality for the space constraints. It could be WAV, or AIFF, or RealAudio for all they care. Since they don't have to buy new hardware to support new codecs it doesn't matter to them.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD. It supports digital recording and is smaller than almost all mp3 players except maybe that mp3 player in a pen from sony. Anyway, it will save you on flash costs and on long trips, having ALL of your music instead of 32 megs worth is a real plus. Only downside that I have found, realtime recording, but you only record once so it hasn't been a hassle. Check out minidisc.org if you are interested. Some players even support text transfer from the computer ect, and it saves so much on media costs.
There's already an MP4 in existence, as far as I remember it's more of a MIDI on steriods type of file format. It contains a description of how the sound source is meant to sound along with the notes.
This is probably a good place to start looking.
The main reason Beta died (except for use in the video industry) was that it was proprietary. Sony wouldn't let anyone else make a Beta machine. JVC allowed (for a fee, of course) anyone to make a VHS machine. Ya, Sony did finally allow licensees, but by that time it was too late.
So, you might want to re-write that statment:
MP3 is Beta, Ogg is VHS.
The biggest difference is that Beta and VHS came out around the same time and fought it out from the start. MP3 is already established, so it might be hard for Ogg to de-throne it.
Blank CDRs are going for about $0.50 / disk. Using ogg or mp3 format, they hold roughly 10 CDs worth of music on one disk
:P obviously. but i thought it needed to be said... some people don't realize, but if you listen... at least, i can't help but hear the difference. mp3s soudn awful to me.
;P
but this isn't all good, it's a question of quantity vs. quality
MP3 players which double as CD Players are the perfect solution -- you can burn your own music collection onto CDs and listen to them anywhere. As the original poster correctly points out, we need ogg support on these hardware mp3 players! Fortunately, most are flashable, so upgrading to new, better formats (such as ogg) shouldn't be a problem.
the whole hardware-mp3-player hype is mind boggling to me. i mean, i understand it, as a fad and gadgetry thing, but.. you're basically making a downgrade in your audio system when you go from a CD player to a straight-up mp3 player. the hybrids are the obvious, good, middle-ground.. as long as the price difference is reasonable.
the hardware fad is so bizarre though,.. there was never this kind of reaction over MOD or S3M
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
CDex is a cdripper for windows that's GPLed. It comes with Vorbis support in its 1.30 beta2 version. Very nice program I use it when I'm in windows and don't want to reboot to use cdparanoia. It also includes LAME 3.84 as it's default encoder. Currently it's the only program that i've found that makes encoding Vorbis .ogg files easy. CDex Homepage, and Source Forge.
I've been looking at a lot of the posts, and most seem to be wringing their hands over whether or not this will end up outgrowing mp3, complete with obligatory references to the VHS/Beta cliche. The most important thing that can be done to ensure that Ogg Vorbis catches on and eventually dominates is to establish transparent support with the major playback software giants. Getting the codecs prepackaged with pieces like WinAmp and the rest of the herd will ensure that kids will be able to play what they download, and if the quality difference is important to them, they'll eventually make the switch, as it were. Of course, this strategy cannot be executed in a vacuum with the expectation of success. The word needs to be put out through the major mp3 distribution channels that Ogg Vorbis is available, that music in that format is available, and that using that format isn't going to be a hassle at all, as long as you have the latest version of your player of choice. Thoughts?
Can this be done with minimal, or *no* loss of quality? IOW, can ogg represent the exact same DCT parameters, block sizes, etc, as mp3 does? Because it would just be that bit of icing on the cake if I would wave my wand and have all my mp3's magically become oggs.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Pirates! Thieves! Anarchists, the lot of you! These Vorbis project people should be locked up for creating tools for copyright violation! Anyone with a .ogg file on their hard drive is guilty of conspiracy to defraud musicians!
I just tried out OGG by encoding an MP3 file from my Moby CD (Porcelain). MP3 was sized at 5.64mb @ 192kb/s and the OGG file was a nice 3.64mb. I saved 2mb there! Encoding from MP3 to OGG took about 2min on my Athlon Thunderbird 700 @ 950 For arguments sake lets say that encoding to OGG saves 2mb per file then I will save about 300mb! (150 files x2)
As for sound quality I noticed no difference between 192kb/s from the MP3 format to the 119kb/s from the OGG format.
I feel that we have a winner here and it will just be a little longer before that OGG will be dominant over MP3 if not its equal. I just hope they get the support they need.
OT: I did find a small and annoying bug in the plugin player. When you are playing an OGG file and try to peruse the playlist it will always bring you back to the song that is playing. You'll have to stop the track to cycle through the other songs, no biggie though.
Just in case you are wondering where the downloads are, http://www.vorbis.com/download.html
When death looks you in the eye, smile. Someone needs to cheer him up.
... isn't just that it's already roughly as good as MP3 on quality and better on compression, but that it can continue to be developed freely until it's much, much better in the future.
Much has been made of the fact that it's free of the MP3 patent problems, but it gains in another way as well: freedom from the inertia and politics of standards committees, and freedom to depart from a single key idea or solution (MP3 is inherently a straightjacket). This pretty much guarantees that its development will proceed at a much faster pace than multi-corporate commercial developments in the same area, as long as its main proponents don't abandon it for a few years.
With that proviso, it seems to me that these inherent advantages put it in a very strong position similar to that of open-source operating systems versus their closed counterparts.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
While it sounds like Mr. Montgomery has a great grasp of the technical aspects of his effort, I'd have liked the interviewer to ask some questions about the project's strategy for getting the eventual product adopted at large. The scenario that comes to my mind is the GIF format. Unisys started enforcing its patents to this technology in 1994, requiring developers to pay a fee to use the GIF format [redundant usage I know, but it seems to read better]. There was widespread grumbling and talk of revolt, but here we are, six years later, still using it while its anointed successor, PNG, languishes. The reason is all of the legacy code out there that must be accomodated. MP3 has gained such a foothold that any tool is going to have to support it. That being the case, the 'good enough' mindset takes over, and it becomes much harder to displace a technology that's already doing an adequate job. If there's a battle-plan to get VQL adopted, I'd like to hear what it is. I might even help :-)
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
VQF is also superior to MP3 (which is, frankly, the worst lossy sound format currently out there), some of which went into the making of MP4. It has free (as in beer) encoders and decoders for Windows (and has had, for some time).
Up against opponents like this, Ogg Vorbis is going to have to pull some amazing rabbits out of the hat, if it's going to be seen as a serious alternative.
Now, I'm not saying that's impossible, or even unlikely - the (truly) Free software world has the benefits of strength in numbers, strength in minds, strength in flexibility, and no paymaster to kow-tow to, every five minutes.
What I -am- saying, though, is that Ogg Vorbis isn't going to achieve anything remotely considerable as success if it's chiefly being compared against a dead & decaying standard, that is only staying upright by the sheer will-power of a few million zombie high-priests.
IMHO, Ogg Vorbis has to (at least) match, if not surpass MP4, in EVERY respect, if it's to be a genuine contender in the War of the Formats.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
- The
.gz format was created because free software couldn't get a Unisys patent license for the LZW algorithm at the core of the .Z format and because Phil Katz's deflation algorithm.
- The
.ogg format was created because free software couldn't get a Fraunhofer patent license for the MPEG layer 3 algorithm at the core of the .mp3 format and because the xiph.org people had a better algorithm.
See the similarities?<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't know about RAR vs. BZ2, but they're both a lot tighter than ZIP.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Similar things were said about the GIF format before Unisys started sending out all of the letters about "Your website owes us $5,000 in licensing..."
Frauhopper (sp?) has, as alluded to in the article, already started exercising some of that muscle. The price of freedom is truly eternal vigilance...
~Hammy
I was thinking that hardware support was key also - and I was wondering since the eMpeg (car mp3 player) had the source availiable, has anyone tried adding Ogg support to it yet?
---> Kendall
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The question is one of control. What happens when Joe Small Band offers mp3's on his site for promo purposes and he get's a letter saying "You owe us $20,000 for use of our compression format." If the implication made about Fudgehopper and the RIAA holds true, this could be used to squeeze the indies and guarantee that music production and distribution stay in the hands of the mega-corporations.
This is just one scenario of many. The fact that Vorbis is available will keep their actions in check. (Similar to the concept that the existance of Debian keeps the other Linux distros in check.)
~Hammy
"Freedom lost can no longer be defended."
Binary is dead. Given the current buzzwordiness of XML, we need a human readable XML based audio format like so.
<beep>
<frequency>50hz</frequency>
</beep>
<guitar>
<style>bass</style>
<note>high C</note>
</guitar>
...
One can apply the same statement conversely. An imperfectly encoded piece of music is listenable, but a badly encoded viedo isn't really worth watching. It's all rather relative and subjective. It all depends on the level of imperfections- some people have a higher level of tolerance than others. The point I was trying to make (Which you completely missed, btw...) was that our eyes will pick out imperfections out of an image quicker than your ears will pick out imperfections in an audio stream. (Did you know that for all the "quality" of a CD or DAT, it's still very imperfect (the sound is composed of linear approximations that are performed at 44 and 48kHz respectively)? Most people will not pick out the imperfections in encoding in those media, but they can notice artifacts in an MPEG2 stream from a DVD if they're using a PC monitor or HDTV monitor to view them.)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So says Handgun Control Inc. And you didn't even get the stat right. The lie they put up is that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used against someone you know. The thing they neglect to tell you is that that includes people you have just met before. The other thing they don't tell you is that most home defense is against people you know. Kinda makes sense, doesn't it?
Stop swallowing what the media tells you and actually research things yourself.
--
alSeen@narnia.net
Quick clue session: there is no such thing as a defensive patent! A patent is a patent. The notion of a 'defensive' one is the intellectual property equivalent of passive-aggressive behavior. At the end of the day it's just a patent and has inevitably, unavoidably put the control in one person's hands, or one entity's, along with all the tools for abuse. There is NO such thing as a defensive patent. If people's desire to create and share their OWN INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS is not enough to protect them legally- then we need a revolution of legal expectations, NOT 'defensive patents'. Are we not clear on the fact that the Vorbis people are doing their own work, in public, pointedly avoiding potential legal problems? Just how much credibility do we want to give potential attackers here? I'd rather be ready to scorn the potential attack and wave lots of evidence of prior art, instead. At some point that HAS to be enough. If it's not enough the system is so totally screwed that it's morally and ethically intolerable to cooperate with it in any way at all...
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Seriously speaking, Vorbis is named after the Pratchett character, but Ogg is not named after Nanny.
Best regards,
January
P.S. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. :-P
So to hell with the 'Dozers, their soundcards won't be producing clean enough recordings to flaunt Vorbis anyways (except for the few mad dozers running kilobuck soundcards, that's different)- if there's anybody capable of doing it, get this stuff deployed on MacOS _pronto_, then do something like make an extension that adds the Vorbis codec to Quicktime. Hell, just whip up a quick and dirty SIOW port for just the CLI tools and have people use that for now- but get it into the hands of the serious professional audio geeks. Heck with the soundcard people! The majority of CONTENT is not generated by CD rippers- I'd say that content was the digital audio, and the ripping is just translating content that already exists. Wouldn't you rather have the artists releasing Vorbis content themselves?
But wait, it gets better! A minimum of one cent per download??? Just how much do they freakin' think I _make_ from the downloads at mp3.com? I don't CHARGE people for those, it's part of the incentive program. As near as I can figure this would be in the thousands of dollars! O_O
Oh, man, you are right, this _is_ scary. Hopefully I can get paid what I'm currently owed while still remaining 'blissfully ignorant' of this situation. To me, the one cent minimum royalty on each download is the CRUSHER- that is an absolute showstopper. Makes me glad I never invested in an encoder beyond BladeEnc (say what you want, if you have the capacity of pre-emphasising the highs you can get a really smooth full sound out of it that's not over-dull).
Who knew? I could see a scenario in which mp3.com itself switches to Vorbis- that is, if it is actually possible to levy an mp3-distributing tax of a penny a download. Oy... this is nuts... looks like I have to teach myself C programming just to be able to compile and build Vorbis binaries for my Mac just to be able to operate as a musician... talk about 'not in the job description'! o_O
go to www.empeg.com and see what you think. 36 Gb of mp3 files in a unit that fits in your dashboard like a standard stereo, but it runs Linux and it rocks!
I zapped all my CD's onto mine, downloaded a couple of ones and put on some of my own band - it is seriously versatile!
Frog51
In napster, add some code to include
In winamp, add an ogg codec as part of the standard release (I think one already exists as a plugin) and add the file association along with the winamp lightning bold icon. Windows doesn't even show file extensions by default - it'll take some people a while to even know it was there.
mp3 carries no brand loyalty - this could be very easy indeed.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
What are you, high? We here at AmigaRut Industries have been working for friggin' years to bring a hardware MOD player to market! The advantages are obvious -- with such a small file size, you can fit tens of thousands of derivative, unimaginative techno dance tracks on a single CD at a sound quality that approaches a rusty gramophone being played through a walkie-talkie sealed inside of a ziplock bag and submerged in a toilet!
I guess the lack of press coverage for AmigaRut's products is just another lamentable sign of the media conspiracy against forward-thinking Amiga-friendly companies striving to keep the hype alive for the latest, most bleeding-edge 80's technology.
Unfortunately, our MOD player has been delayed because we have been working to incorporate not only S3M files, but also the old Apple II faux-stereo PCM files, complete with a codec that faithfully reproduces the wonderful warm, buzzy sound of the Apple II system speaker.
You're not going to find value like that in any johnny-come-lately MP3 player, bucko!
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Let's look at the situation for mp3...
If you want to sell a program that decodes mp3's, it'll cost you 50 cents/unit shipped, with a $15,000 annual minimum royalty (if you give it away no licensing fee is necessary). Should you want to ship an encoder, free or not, it'll cost you $2.50/unit if you develop your own software, or $5.00/unit if you use Frauenhofer's, again with a $15,000 annual minimum.
So, what if you're a musician and you want to sell your music on the net in mp3 format? Hey, it'll only cost you 1% of the price you charge per mp3 (1 cent minimum), again with that pesky $15,000 annual minimum. Such a bargain.
Now, compare that with an encoder/decoder that costs you exactly $0, and makes better sounding files to boot. The musician makes an extra $15,000/year minimum just for switching formats. Diamond gets to keep another $0.50 per Rio (and this in an industry where they spend millions to whittle a few cents off the per unit price); those selling encoders get to keep an extra $2.50 - $5.00 per unit. Do you really think the Vorbis guys will have a hard time getting people to use their format?
It may take a while for the finale to come, but I think it's a good bet that mp3 is already the walking dead.
First, Beta 2 is not out yet!. It'll be on www.vorbis.org and www.vorbis.com in inch high letters when it is :-) We're still shooting for releasing tomorrow.
Consumers are not going to switch, the industry is. Both small and large industry players are going to try to avoid mp3 because of the licensing. For a small artist, $15,000 is alot of money. For the big companies, a flat percentage/per track fee is a huge chunk of cash. I stand to save my sponsor, iCast, around eight figures next year and they're not even one of the industry 'heavyweights' (yetNow, the Slashdot crowd is not the typical herd of consumer sheep, but we're also a drop in the consumer bucket (we have more weight as techies than marketing segments). Ogg Vorbis will achieve market penetration top down because it saves everyone a ton of money and frees business plans from a large, uncontrollable external influence And if *companies* will use Vorbis to eliminate being yanked around (who says mp3 prices aren't going to go up? Remember, FhG reserves the right to set licensing case-by-case; MusicMatch gave away around 20% of their company for a free encoder license), the Right Thing for individuals is even more clear.
"Ogg Vorbis: Don't sell your Soul (or your equity)"
Actually, this is backwards. Beta died exactly because Sony strangled the format with licensing in order to keep complete control of it. VHS won because of relatively open licensing. First off, you're probably comparing beta 1; there were several analysis bugs that are fixed in CVS and beta 2.Secondly, I mentioned although I did not emphasize, that Ogg Vorbis does not currently have channel coupling. If you're comparing Ogg Vorbis to LAME, you're comparing an essentially 'bundled mono' compression [today] to mid/side stereo in mp3. If you tell lame to compress two mono channels (like *current* Ogg Vorbis is), you'll see that you need to hike LAME up to about 192-225kbps to compare to Vorbis 128kbps in non-mid/side stereo. The fact that Vorbis (l/r stereo) still often beats LAME (m/s stereo) is astounding.
Yeah, it's not fair to say 'we're better than mp3 if you cripple mp3'. The point is that this is the next feature we're implementing and at that point, our bitrate, for a given stereo quality, will drop by about 40% just like in mp3. From Segher, a hardcore mp3 hacker and friend:
(I was being conservative with 30-50kbps) You're right. There's no secret conspiracy. It's all very out in the open. MPEG (FhG especially) is fundamental in developing SDMI, and RIAA-mandated SDMI is an integral part of AAC/MPEG4.Courtney Love and others go off on this particular rant much better than I do, so I'll let it go at that ;-)
Correct, but that is not the case here.MPEG is not non-commercial (why do people thing they are?). It is an industry standards consortium. The aim of the RIAA and MPEG is to *make money* and maintain the necessary control to do so. That does not mean that they will act abusively, however the chances of them doing so are greater without any moderating agent.
Who here remembers the old phone company joke [back when AT&T had a monopoly in the US]: "We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company."? Extrapolate and roleplay accordingly. Why do people get up in arms about Echelon controlling/monitoring email when it's perfectly OK for MPEG/RIAA/SDMI to do the same thing?
Also true for now. Vorbis decode is *not* more complex than mp3, I'm simply a better engineer than I am an optimizer. Decode is bound on the iMDCT and iDRFT transforms I wrote (couldn't find any open source for them at the time) and they're not particularly speedy. Segher, Takehiro from GOGO/LAME and others are looking at making my solid but slow code a little less station-wagon-like(BTW, if you're using top to see CPU usage, you're suffering from undersampling inaccuracy. At a minimum, compare mp3 decoders to vorbis decoders using 'time' not 'top' ;-)
IP patents are slowly turning into "watch the USPTO go clinically insane", so there are no guarantees. However, iCAST is footing the bill for an independent patent review of Ogg Vorbis. I'm probably not allowed to make an official statement at this time, but I will say (whether I should or notWe'll have an official statement eventually, but the Wheels of Justice are already grinding much faster than the lawyers involved are used to ;-)
I will also say I've been pleasantly surprised at how technically sharp the lawyers we're working with are.
You know, converting back and forth between two lossy formats can't be too good for the quality of the music.
I don't think ogg-to-MP3 will really be necessary, assuming that WinAmp (and XMMS of course) will have plugins for Ogg.
When I start using Ogg, I'm going to leave my Napster MP3s alone, and just work on re-burning my legal MP3s (surprisingly, about half of my collection) as Oggs from the CDs.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Can anyone tell a bit more about what metadata can be included in the .ogg files? A link, maybe? It was shortly mentioned that someone was working on it... Or is reading the source the only way right now?
Vorbis is not necessarily going to keep these guys in check. I think that's overly optimistic. I think they're going to end up putting the screws on anyhow, simply because they can- no matter whether they will truly get away with it in the long run. And 'Hammy's point is absolutely apt- sure, fine, rip other people's CDs all you want, but if you intend to run a small business centered around your music (or even music services, such as studio rental) you can't hide. You're out there, and you've gotta use _something_ to show people what you're doing, and more than anything else you need a distribution medium that's not going to soak you with royalties (never mind the 15K minimum payment!). That makes the cost of entry for being a 'record label' or 'studio that releases demonstrations via mp3' just prohibitive- it pushes your breakeven point painfully far into the future, and you have to jack up your prices to cover this and can't find customers at the higher prices.
Ogg Vorbis is the answer- even if it wasn't arguably better sounding than mp3 it would be the answer. It becomes a question of mindshare- we do need more extensive ports (I'm startled there's _still_ no MacOS port- do they want to reach musicians or not?) but that'll come. Then it becomes a symbiotic relationship- small content providers must turn to Ogg Vorbis to have an unencumbered form of media to distribute with, and Ogg will rely on this grassroots support among the _creators_ (i.e. small business!), who will be powerful allies in a way that napster people never could. There's nothing like being faced with the threat (immediate or expected) of massive extortionate licensing problems to make you support something else with all your heart and soul ;)
I sure wish Vorbis _was_ available to me- if I could afford to buy Linux machines just to encode Ogg with, I could probably afford mp3 licensing at its deadly, soon-to-come worst. But even though I can't have it yet, I can see which side I'm on.
Your voice observations are correct; mp3 has the same problem at comparable bitrates (compare ogg/mp3 in mono to see). Voice contains alot of high-frequency, highly correlated 'noise', but it's pulsed (and this is why all cutting edge voice codes are time-based and pulse/noise excited). mp3 has the same problems, but the extra boost of mid/side stereo is just enough to mask it (mp3 is actually starving the side channel to give you effectively a single 128kbps mono for voice)
This voice problem (and pulsed noise artifacts in general) the last artifact we're actively working on. That along with channel coupling coming soon in Ogg should be enough eliminate the problem. We have the problem about half-licked in beta 2, but not completely eliminated at 128kbps; at 160 and above, there are enough extra bits to just snow the sample with extra resolution until the problem disappears.
Monty
Streaming is nowhere near economical as is. The existing commercial formats take way too big a bite of a would-be streaming company's budget. To make way for small broadcasters, you need Ogg or something like it.
Running a company like iCast, you see your margins get shaved to hairs by the likes of Rob Glaser and Bill Gates. But it's not feasible to engineer a new format from scratch and force its adoption on the market. So what do you do?
Find a smart, dedicated believer in an alternative format, and fund his dream project. In the end, you give away the product, but you also liberate yourself from crushing per-stream licensing and expensive, unstable, coercive OS choices. You give away the milk, and in return, you get the cow. If the standard takes off, they will be able to compete against Real, and iCast's investors will be slapping each other's backs over the best investment they ever made. Just keep the smart guys who made it possible, treat them well, and if the format takes over, you can get all the business for outsourced streaming (and very few companies want to do it themselves) since you are, after all, the source of the streaming server software that powers it.
That's why you should pay very close attention to the article and parent comment's mentions of hardware players and industry support. These guys have made a very smart play, one I wish I was in a position to make because I saw it coming.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Monty and others have done work on a video codec, but it hasn't been released yet. They want to get Vorbis out the door before re-focusing much effort on that.
--
Ski-U-Mah!