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The Future of Ogg Vorbis
Brett writes "The author of MAD, the fixed point MP3 decoder comments on what is wrong with Ogg Vorbis, with a response from jack, one of the founders of the format.
"Ogg Vorbis may be the holy grail of patent-free audio compression, but there are some serious issues blocking its path to widespread acceptance. Unfortunately most of us are powerless to correct the situation; the problems must be addressed by Vorbis' creators. "
The rest of the of the story is currently running on K5." And Jack's response is enlightening as well.
So, the problem is that there is no specification
of Ogg Vorbis. There we go, whole problem in one line.
Fractint was fast with integer operations, cause in those days, integer operations were traditionally much faster than floating point operations on the x86 platform.
The fixed point implementation of Vorbis would be very useful for embedded hardware where floating point support is usually not available on its CPUs.
Banu
Sorry to say it, but I cannot use it on my iPod and with iTunes. I ripped my 125+ audio-cds to MP3 as when I got my iPod.
I hate it when people comes up with this kind of reasons for not switching to a free format and making the world a better place... but now I do it myself. It is a pity. It is a shame.
But maybe I am wrong? Has anyone installed Ogg in iTunes, and is there any chans to hack the iPod?
..because I could correct the idiot who moderated this Interesting. Is there a "Misinformative" rating?
Anyway, not to interrupt a fun GPL thread, but Ogg Vorbis is BSD-licensed precisely to encourage adoption.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
As open source Ogg Vorbis is released under the GPL/LGPL. However doesn't this prevent companies to integrate the sources into their software ?
Except... Ogg Vorbis isn't released under the GPL/LGPL. The license is basically BSD in form, but different wording.
To quote Jack, which wouldn't be necessary if you had read the linked message:
It's actually Free-er than most Free Software in some ways, siince we chose to prioritize adoption rather than require everyone buy into the LGPL. In essence by giving up a few freedoms with the more lax license, we are preserving freedom because the world will adopt Ogg, the only audio codec right now of it's kind that can be freely implemented.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
As open source Ogg Vorbis is released under the GPL/LGPL. However doesn't this prevent companies to integrate the sources into their software ?
This is wrong.
The spec is public domain-- it's not well documented, evidently, but the format itself is public domain.
The utilities are GPLed, so you have to distribute the source to anything that encompases them.
The libraries themselves, however, are under BSD.
See The Ogg Vorbis FAQ.
-Rob
Where did you hear that Ogg Vorbis [by which I assume you mean the reference implementation libraries] was released under the GPL/LGPL?
The sample tools are GPL - but the libraries are under a license similar to the 3-clause [ie old] BSD. This is specifically to encourage widespread adoption of the standard. Think about it: if you want to add Ogg Vorbis support to your application or embedded box, you won't be borrowing the command-line tools, just the libraries.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
For embedded, you want as cheap as possible while still able to do the job. The CPUs commonly used in embedded designs often don't have floating point capabilities - too much silicon, too little need. Complexity means not only unit cost but power usage and cooling requirements.
Sure, you can ship a machine with a 486DX instead of an ARM, but the optimal solution is to figure out how to use fixed point. Software-emulated floating point won't cut it either - too inefficient. In the embedded world, "inefficient" doesn't mean "oh well, just so long as the CPU is fast enough to handle it", it means "unit cost is higher than necessary since we should have been able to get away with a slower CPU".
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Shameless plug... For some who might be interested in compression voice for VoIP, there's also the Speex voice codec. For voice (not music) it provides good quality at lower bit-stream than Vorbis.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
And what does 'Audio Decompression Hardware' mean to you? You rezlize that any such hardware would be format-specific, right? You realize that only very large corps can really afford to get ASICs fab'd, right? And you realize that it's likely much more cost effective, as well as much more *flexible*, to shove the latest-generation embedded CPU (which is probably $20 in quantity) into the machine, and do your audio decomp in software? Well, obviously you don't realize one of those or you wouldn't have asked the question...
--Z
Personally I thought the news that Ogg Vorbis is now shipped with Winamp 2.80 was the news of they day. Any guess as to how many times over this will double the installed base of computers capable of playing Vorbis-files?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I totally agree. As the hardware developer on a portable mp3 player I can tell you that unless you want to use a hardware decoder (the MAS... chip) and get locked into a particular format (MP3) you're need an software implementation sans floating point. While it is possible to get embedded proc's with floating point capability, the price is simply not worth it in most cases. For instance an EP7312 with no floating point costs about $20, an EP9312 with floating point costs more like $50. Which is why small companies with a low budget like mine choose the cheaper proc's. We are totally open to supporting Ogg, but our first release will support MP3 only because we do have a free library that runs on our proc and runs on it well (well we pay 25 cents per player to Fraunhoffer, but I think that's entirely reasonable)
They are decent processors - you can do MP3/WMA/Whatever without an FPU. Hell, you can play Quake on them at a reasonable speed. Same goes for Vorbis - it "just" needs an integer implementation, which is rather a large task that nobody in the public domain wants to take on, and no business wants to spend development time on.
Still, it's a nice step in the right direction...
JPEG vs GIF is more like MP3 vs MIDI. (actually that's a reasonable analogy
:: mp3/ogg/etc. (lossy compression via removal of high frequencies)
:: flac/lpac/shorten/etc. (lossless compression via huffman coding compression)
:: midi (lossless symbolic description of media primitives)
Here's a more reasonable isomorphism between audio and image formats:
JPG
.gif/.png
.svg/.eps/etc.