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Ogg Vorbis Changes (Just About) Everything
The good people of Ogg Vorbis have a new beta release out (number 4) for which they claim better compression, nicer sound, fewer bugs and more protein than the last. While that's nice enough, that's not the only news on the Vorbis front: probably more important in the long run is that the guys behind Vorbis have formed a non-profit called Xiph.org to replace the S-class corporation they've been developing as for a while, Xiphophorous. Emmett of BinaryFreedom had
a cool chat with Vorbis developers Christopher Montgomery
and Jack Moffit about the new release,foundation, encoding, and hardware capable of playing back the Vorbis format -- well worth reading. Plus, you can
download the new beta (and some sample tunes), too. Oh, yes, and there's the little matter of moving from the GPL [?] to BSD license [?] , with what they say is RMS' blessing. You will have to read to find out why, though;)
Is it just me or is that Jesus hitting a snake with an ax? What the heck does the logo mean?
Well at any rate, I have used the betas of the past from Ogg Vorbis and they work quite well. Keep up the good work guys.
"I am sorry, I switched to a new ISP becuase you guys dont offer Yahoo like AOL does!" - annonymous customer
This is actually not surprising, he had a similar reasoning for making the gzip compression code available on a BSD-like license.
It will probably be too much to hope for, that some of the "RMS will only accept GPL" people will take note.
If you can get to the heavily slashdotted interview on binaryfreedom.com, you'll see RMS's comments on the license change.
Why do I get the feeling that if you asked RMS's opinion on slaughtering the innocent for the glory of Satan, and bathing in their warmly splashing blood, he'd reply I'm all for it, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".
But seriously though.. the reason the Xiph folks gave for their license switch is that they want Ogg Vorbis to be "a basic building block of the internet for multimedia", and hence chose to go BSD: minimise the restrictions on the source, maximise the chance that it will be widely adopted. Fair call - you gotta look at what you're trying to achieve, and ask yourself if every man and his dog stick my code into a proprietary app, does that help my cause or hurt it? In this case, I think it's quite clear that it would help Ogg Vorbis if, to pick and example at random, Microsoft stuck a closed-source .OGG replay codec into Windows.
If quality is of any importance to you then you don't want to convert from MP3 to Vorbis, as they're both lossy with their compression and you're very likely to start losing important data going from one to the other. It's the same with any lossy formats, any data type.
You'd be better off keeping the MP3s you have and just doing new ones with Vorbis, unless you really do have enough time to re-rip them.
Last time OV was mentioned on /. (the last beta, presumably) I download the same encoder and xmms plugin for playback. I encoded a couple of CDs and tried it out. Here's what I found:
First, the sample encoder is MUCH easier to use than what I've already been using (GRip). I don't know if that's because my current method is so terrible or because the new one is so great.
Second, the resulting files were about 10% smaller. Others may say "so what, hard drives are cheap", but:
1) I only have 4.5 GB and don't have the extra cash to buy larger.
2) Larger hard drives make a 10% savings even MORE worthwhile. Consider: If I saved 10% of a 4 GB drive, that's 40 MB--room for maybe 10 additional songs or about one CD. But if I saved 10% of a 400 GB drive, that's an extra 4 GB--enough for 100 CD's.
Third, the sound quality was "equivalent". That is, I couldn't tell the difference, BUT I'm not an expert and my sound equipment is FAR from top of the line (just some computer speakers plugged into an AWE32).
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The logo is sort of obscure, but the snake/sine wave thing is fairly obvious, and everybody likes to see powerful mythic figures hitting things with hammers.
But what in the WORLD were they thinking with the name? Ogg Vorbis? Nowhere near the "catchiness"
of saying mp3. Not to mention that any format must have a great three-letter acronym to catch on. I think "xiph" is a great name for the format, and XPH would make a catchy TLA.
Please guys, change the name, or adopt such a TLA. The name "Ogg Vorbis" just sounds way too plan-9-from-outer-space geeky.
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Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise on the way to finagling everyone into using his beloved GPL. He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de facto standard, and then start including features in it with GPL code, so that anyone who wants to stay up with the development path has to join his merry band of intellectual property guerrillas. Of course, when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend", but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, wold he?
Look, that makes no sense. Just sit back and think about it. Microsoft "embrace and extend" = create incompatable versions so that everybody is locked into using Microsoft products/standards, and so that Microsoft gets sole control over something which was once out there for all to use. GPL "embrace and extend" = forever make it impossible for any one self-interest to use something to their own ends without leaveing it out in the open for anybody else to use.
How is this comparable? One is inherently selfish. The other is inherently protective. They're opposite.
Sure, criticize the restrictiveness of the GPL. That's fine. But that restrictiveness is of a *very* different nature than the restrictiveness of proprietary licenses such as what comes out of Microsoft, and it's just a stupid troll to try to compare the two.
Regarding the "IP guerrilla" nature of RMS and the GPL: sure, weakening IP is their goal. On the other hand, their way of going about it is entirely fair, and calling them a guerrilla isn't. They aren't going in there and insisting that proprietary software be made illegal, or that proprietary software must be opened up. They are *suggesting* that you might want to choose not to use it. What the GPL does is insure that that which *starts* open, *stays* open. What's so awful about that? It sounds like a damn good idea to me. If you're going to defend propreitary software, bear in mind that almost nobody who produces such software would ever let anybody else use their code without all sorts of restrictive licensing terms dictated by *them*. These restrictive licensing terms will tend to be must less protective of "general use" than the GPL is.
-Rob
Every Ogg + XMMS crash bug we know about is fixed... in XMMS CVS. Because there have been no major releases of XMMS recently, most people are still downloading and using buggy 'official' XMMS packages. Thus, folks are unwittingly reporting bugs that have been fixed for weeks or months. A number of the crash bugs were in the Ogg plugin, but a number have also been in XMMS itself, which Ogg simply had the bad luck to tickle. Upgrading the plugin alone can't save you.
So, first grab and build XMMS from XMMS CVS. It actually builds cleanly with minimum fuss. At that point, if you get a crash playing Ogg, the XMMS developers and we would very much like to hear about it.
Monty
xiph.org