Ogg The Conqueror? RC2 Is Out

jonathan_ingram writes: "There has been a lot of discussion recently in Slashdot about sound compression formats. Much has been focused on Ogg Vorbis, but the most recent version available has been a beta released in Feburary. Today, RC2 of Vorbis has been released. The most important of the many changes is channel coupling, which means that Vorbis can now encode bitsteams at a much lower bitrate than before. Try it out today!"

Comments

Damnit, not on my PJBox (Compaq, you hEAR?!)

[torpor]

Sitting here streaming MP3's over to my PJB100 (www.pjbox.com), *WISHING* I could use .ogg files instead.

Come on COMPAQ, what's it going to take to get you to loosen things up a bit on the PJB100 specs so we can get Ogg ported to it?

Thought Compaq used to be cool with OSS-style development, but then I got a PJB100...

Why?

[Sc00ter]

"The most important of the many changes is channel coupling, which means that Vorbis can now encode bitsteams at a much lower bitrate than before."

Why would you want lower bitrates? for a worse sounding ogg??

Why would I want to give up MP3s?

[fetta]

I understand the philosophical arguments for using an open source standard instead of MP3s, but I have a hard time imagining that Ogg Vorbis will win out. MP3s are easy to use, easy to create (from existing CDs, at least), etc. I don't see the big motivating factor for people to go to Ogg Vorbis. The future seems to be divided up between MP3 and copy-protected formats provided by companies like Microsoft.

What am I missing? What is going to motivate anyone but idealogically motivated open source advocates to switch to Ogg Vorbis?