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The Future of Ogg Vorbis

Posted by Hemos on from the patent-free-royalty-free dept.

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.

5 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. My iPod by Zo0ok · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:My iPod by foniksonik · · Score: 5, Informative

      There is Ogg for iTunes!!!!

      http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200 20 424233612407

      and more directly:

      http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/

      "This site is dedicated to open source QuickTime development for popular open source audio and video codecs. We are currently working on Ogg Vorbis, an audio codec developed by Xiphophorus, and MNG, an animation video codec.

      We have just begun the project, expect many changes over the next few weeks. We will offer a site for developers, as well as one for end-users interested in using our software. At the moment, some areas of our site are not yet implemented. "

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
  2. Re:Isn't the problem the GPL ? by rknop · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Ogg Vorbis is in Winamp 2.80 by eddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  4. How about you look up which CPUs they use? by pslam · · Score: 5, Informative
    I think I could answer that far more accurately (see my user info page). Guess what, most of the "good" MP3 players use ARM based CPUs:
    • empeg/Rio car player: StrongARM 220MHz, roughly equivalent to a Pentium 133 without FPU/MMX. Plays MP3s fine at a tiny fraction of CPU.
    • iPod - Portal player dual ARM-7 core 74MHz, roughly equivalent to a 486-100 without FPU/MMX.
    • Rio Receiver: Cirrus 7212 ARM7-TDMI 74MHz. Plays MP3/WMA.
    • Rio Central: StrongARM 220MHz. Plays MP3/WMA.

    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.