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Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3?
An anonymous reader asks: "Ogg Vorbis is hitting stable and hopefully will release 1.0 soon. But I'm wondering, who is going to use it? MP3 is very popular on the net and beyond, but it's based on patents. Software patents aren't legal in Europe, but are in other parts of the world. Is Ogg Vorbis making a chance to become the next music-standard for the net and beyond. This mainly because there are no patents broken by this standard. Will it be a standard for the world or one for the books?"
Never having bothered to do it before with MP3, I've recently started ripping my CD collection to .ogg files, and the quality is good to my (tin) ears. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent needs to sell a dedicated hardware player that takes CD-Rs, so I can play back 10 hours of books on tape from a single disk. I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?
If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.
One of the problems with PNG's is the size and availability of viewers for the format. If an alternative format is created that's superior, and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available, then it has a chance of being adopted.
I remember first hearing about MP3's as an alternative to WAV files. While the differences are even more vast than those between PNG and GIF, I still maintain that it was the availability of viewers that helped MP3 to become the standard.
We live in a different world than the world that the PNG was introduced to. With more bandwidth, more users on the net, who knows how the PNG would have fared in the modern world with plenty of viewers.
Well, I remember back in 96 when mp3's were starting to get extreamly popular. People at that time were trading WAV files across the net and in news groups. MP3's were kinda' hard to come by. You had to goto someone's warez/mp3 site and links were usually broken, etc. But they gained more and more audiance every day. But sadly enough it didn't become the 'standard' until microsoft included it in the next release of windows.
... kinda' like DivX ...
Windows 98 had mp3 playing built into it. Thats when it completely became the standard. MP3's had made it extreamily far and were used by unix admins and warez puppies all over the world.. but was unknown to the every day user. Windows 98 and napster brough mp3's to the masses.
The world isn't crying for a new format like it was crying for mp3's. Unless this new format is smaller and sounds better, I don't think it stands a chance. Plus I don't imagine microsoft including Open Source code into their media player
I dunno, guess we'll see.. ???
To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.
I think MP3/OGG is a bit different than Beta vs. VHS. For one thing, availibility isn't limited to what the movie studios and Blockbuster decide to carry - it is as easy to rip a CD to MP3 as it is to OGG, and as easy to download, if both are availible. So, the only thing limiting acceptance is availibility, and hardware support.
Personally, I think stand-alone MP3 players are still a niche market, still in the first generation. The digital audio enthusiasts are buying huge hard drives and ripping their CD collections, 40 gig at a time, and playing them over some computer-to-stereo setup. The consumer electronics are too primitive to not have a computer at the center of your digital audio setup.
As I said, these enthusiasts are ripping their entire CD collections, and, when possible, making them availible on Napster or Napster clones. If you want the "universal jukebox" effect, it's not the 14-yr-old Spears fans who support it, but these enthusiasts, who aren't afraid to admit they bought a dozen albums from eighties hair bands.
If you can convince these folks that you have a better format, one that isn't controlled by record companies or patents, which sounds better on their systems, then they will take the time to re-encode their stuff. It will be availible through the usual suspects, and people will learn that, if you want obscure stuff, go Ogg.
Like the original MP3 revolution, this one won't be led by Joe Six-Pack. This one will be led by the audiophiles and the pioneers.
I have been heavily into mp3 for the last 4 years. I have a couple gig of files and just last weekend ripped my first .ogg. I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality. There are already several software players that support ogg like freeamp and xmms. There are two things missing that will hold ogg back:
1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.
2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers. And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg. Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.
One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.
I'm no super audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.
What I notice is that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer, NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.
But for home, it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.
First piece I encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.
No, this was different, the high end was definitely there... but something else too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3 makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar. Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation. It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.
You COULD put it in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low bitrates
You might also say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan?
Can this truly be the case?
Hell yes.
I don't understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.
One thing is clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996, but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void.
If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...
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I heard the BBC (yes, the UK one) is aiming to use OpenDivX and OGG Vorbis as their primary streaming formats some time in the future. They run Linux on most of their hardware anyway, had some quarrels with Microsoft because they refused to support Windows 2000 (with their media server) when running under VMware or something, weren't allowed to link Realplayer Plugins directly from their page by Real.com - so that's the next option.
I'd really like to know more about this, if anyone has some more insider knowledge please reply.
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=IF= you started getting CD-players from major companies, on the high-streets, which could play Ogg Vorbis-encoded files, you would see it being used. Otherwise, it's a dead duck.
Mind you, it's not helped by the crappy encoder, the heavy media publicity of MP3.com and Napster, and the somewhat poor showing in a recent comparison review.
Ogg Vorbis =should= be as good, if not better, than MP4, VQ, and other "high-quality" lossy formats. It isn't. It's about on-par, but it's just not there.
IMHO, if Ogg Vorbis is to seriously challange the other formats, it HAS to have better handling of different frequences. 5-6 bands seems fairly typical for audio, but with research suggesting that there's a LOT of sound information held in "texture", rather than actual audible sound, you might easily want to have 12-16 bands to reliably handle sound texture.
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