Ogg Vorbis 1.0

uvasmith writes "According to the Ogg Vorbis website... Release 1.0 is now ready and tagged as 'vorbis1_0_public_release' in CVS. This is a full release of a 1.0 encoder, decoder and tool set. The encoder, decoder and tools now implement all Vorbis 1.0 specification features including low-bitrate, cascading and channel coupling." Update: 07/19 17:05 GMT by C :It seems someone jumped the gun a bit in mentioning the release, but now it's official! Check out the download page, the letter from their CEO and (if you wish) cough up a few bucks at the donation page! For those audiophiles among us, you can check out a side-by-side audio comparison here. Oh, and don't forget the free music!

Comments

Still no specification

[Flarners]

A reference implementation is great and all, but until they get off their arses and release an exact specification of the Ogg format and codec, it's never going to take off. The reference decoder makes extensive use of floating point math, which is great for desktop systems, but absolutely unacceptable for portable devices of any sort. The only way to get an integer decoder right now is either to pay Xiph for their integer decoder (not bloody likely for most hardware companies; they don't have to pay to implement MP3, why should they pay for Ogg?) or to hack one together yourself. The latter option is infeasible until they get their act together and put out a specification.

Sure, someone could just work from the reference implementation, but then their decoder inherits any bugs or other faults of the original decoder, and "features" that weren't meant to be part of the specification become standard. This is not good software engineering, and Xiph is ensuring that Ogg will never be used outside of the circles of smelly Linux zealots who use it now.

Re:(don't flame me) Why?

[Jahf]

Why should we take the time to educate you?

Everything doesn't have to be cool to everyone ... if it were it wouldn't be as "cool".

If you're happy with your 160K MP3s, keep them ... if you're happy with your MP3 encoding solution, make more MP3s with it.

If not ... then look into it. Some people, myself included, have held off doing a full digitization of our CDs until we had a product we liked to do it ... now we have it ... so to use this is cool.