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.

Comments

Barriers to acceptance

[lushman]

I can see one main way for Ogg to gain widespread acceptance quickly - as the sound track of your run-of-the-mill, MPAA-angering DiVX. MP3 soundtracks only allow for 2 channels, whereas Ogg will allow for n. The main thing that pisses me off about DiVX is the lack of 5.1.

Imagine how widespread Ogg would be if it was the favored soundtrack of the DiVX generation.

Re:arrogance

[Zachary DeAquila]

Actually, I got the impression that the author was very frustrated at trying to do an independent 'from-spec' implementation of Ogg... which is impossible since there's no spec.

Code defines an implementation, not a specification, and using code as a spec leads to 'bug compatible' further implementations (ie. Yeah, that's feature's done really poorly, but it has to in order to be compatible with the bug(s) in the original)
This is ungood.

--Z

My iPod

[Zo0ok]

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?

Re:My iPod

[foniksonik]

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. "

wtf?

[SuiteSisterMary]

In regards to the standards bodies, there are really two well known ones, the IETF and the W3C.

Why, pray tell, would you try to submit an audio codec to the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the World Wide Web Consortium? Why not submit it to one of the 'really well known' and yet APPROPRIATE standards bodies?

Re:Isn't the problem the GPL ?

[rknop]

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

Re:Most embedded systems don't have an FPU

[Skuto]

>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 way you state this sounds like as if Vorbis can't be done with integer-only artihmetic, which is false.

The reference implementation uses floats, because it makes the code easier to understand (that's what the article indirectly is about!), but there's no reason why you can't have integer decoders (and they already exist...)

--
GCP

Reasons

[moonboy]

• The name. Cool for geeks, but for the general public, it sounds funny. It gives no indication whatsoever about the product and what it's used for. Granted 'mp3' isn't much better, but that leads to the next point.
  
• mp3 was "first to market". It is deeply entrenched .
  
• Ogg may be better sound quality-wise, but for the majority of mp3 users, mp3's "sound good enough" and Ogg doesn't offer enough of an improvement for people to encode all of their stuff over again.
  
• Yes Ogg is FREE but again, the average Joe could care less about Free or Open Source software.
  

Sorry if I sound like I'm trolling. I'm not. I'm just being honest.

Ogg Vorbis is in Winamp 2.80

[eddy]

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?

How about you look up which CPUs they use?

[pslam]

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.