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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.
what strikes me most in the article is the sheer arrogance with wich the author tries to discredit the xiph.org people. the author immediately assumes the worst from them (the xiph.org people). especially the argument where he states that (i quote)"In effect, Xiph.Org presently has a monopoly on the only viable implementations of Vorbis."
come one, it's open source, and it's in development. the author of the k5 story is clearly a coder, so start to work on it. help them write the specs, help build a version of the libvorbis that doesn't require a platform that should natively support floating-point calculations, etc etc.
the vorbis people would welcome the guy, but instead of coding, he complains. now that's what i call constructive feedback... not!
From the Vorbis guy's response it's clear what the problem is: The idea is great, the plan is good, but the deliverables just take time to materialize. Nothing bad about that, it's true for practically every piece of software (or related, like the Ogg Vorbis specification.)
Regardless of whether the author of the K5 piece is right about the points he discusses, the Ogg Vorbis creators should take his criticism to heart instead of dismissing it. It's not about whether all those points are valid, so trying to prove that they are not doesn't accomplish anything. They should understand that apparantly they have a problem communicating their plans to their possible supporters from the development community and that what they are doing apparantly makes a strange impression.
They should be glad someone took the time to actually write this down and complain instead of just forgetting about their project and doing something else.
Its not arrogance. We all want Ogg to be in wider use and to appear in portable players. From this discussion it is very clear that Ogg Vorbis is still very much in development and needs to be much more stable before anyone starts making software and hardware Ogg players. An incomplete specification and a reference implementation is not sufficient.
I use madplay and I'd like to see a version for Ogg, but at this stage it doesn't seem like Xiph are ready for developers. As they say, wait for 1.0 final and the promised complete documentation.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
What kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player? How about a car stereo? Like, say.. an empeg? Which doesn't have a much in the way of CPU, including the fine lack of a floating point processor?
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For example, I am not aware of any flash portable pocket player that has an FPU. That's because it's entirely possible to do MP3/WMA in integer. Nobody is going to fit an expensive and battery draining processor into their product just to support an extreme minority codec.
By using floating point for the algorithms, libvorbis is ruled out from nearly all embedded devices. At the moment it pretty much only runs (in real time) on PC/Mac systems.
The entire point in this statement/response is setting expectations. The programmers expects to recieve the same support about the format that he got when he was developing MAD... the format developers, not being commercially funded, spend their time working on the tangible aspects of the application (bugs, libs, etc) and not the supplemental portions (specs). They expect that people would rather have the software to use over some dry RFC...
I know this is going to sound petty, but I have a problem with the name. I mean, mp3 is short, catchy, easy to remember, and doesn't sound dumb to people that aren't techie. Imagine saying "Look at my new portable Ogg Vorbis player I got for my birthday" to your non techie spouse. "Ogg what!?!"
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The problem with OV is that it doesn't make enough of a jump in compression from its predecessor, the MP3 format.
MP3s will continue to rein supreme, Iron Chef style, until someone releases a new compression algorythm that saves at least 10x more space. It is too much work to convince MOST people to use other forms of music compression when there is negligable savings (in quality and size) for the average user.
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Sorry if I sound like I'm trolling. I'm not. I'm just being honest.
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It would also help to lobby people like Winamp, LimeWire, WinMX etc. to include Ogg as a recognized format by default making it easier to locate and play music.
What I'm going to say is what software engineers already know.
The specifications for software are much, much more important than your implementation. If the specifications are written completely and well, the design of said software project will "fall" from the specifications, and the implementation will "fall" from the design. "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact; at best, you will have an incomplete specs document (because of developers who incompletely document their own code), and at worst you will have WRONG specs (because a developer makes an innocent typo that doesn't get caught).
Sure, the ogg stream format and the vorbis audio format have been frozen for a year; however, code is not self-documenting. One of my wisest professors said that the only man he has known that writes self-documenting code is Knuth, and you might be a good hacker, but you are NOT Knuth. Every mortal man needs specifications and design documents to be able to make ANYTHING out of ANY piece of code; hell, I have some relatively simple Java apps I hacked together six months ago that would read like Greek if I didn't have my specs and my design documents.
How can anyone expect to reasonably use an undocumented format?
Either way, it's generally a good idea to have spec done prior to completing your product. I know the hackers out there will balk at this simple minded engineer, but some people out there think that writing down what you're going to do before you do it, might be a decent way to get it done. But let's face it, writing specs isn't always the sexiest work.