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Real Will Include Ogg Vorbis Support
Skuto writes "Following the example of AOL with Winamp, RealNetworks has decided to give Ogg Vorbis their sign of approval and will be including support into their player software. The press release has more information.
Meanwhile, independent listening tests are being set up to determine how well Vorbis fares against its competitors WMA, AAC and MP3Pro. You can help by signing up for the tests here." A couple of comments (1, 2)
in our previous story provide the best description of what Real is doing, if you missed them.
If they will make it always become the default player for everything despite your multiple attempts to make it otherwise!
Erutangis ym si siht.
Does anybody still have Real Player installed? And actually use it for a general player and not just for when certain cites require it for video clips?
Software decoders in Winamp, Real, and hopefully Quicktime is only the first step. Ogg will be in the pink when hardware decoders start showing up in the form of CD MP3 players with Vorbis Support and DVD players that will decode Ogg's as well as MP3's and other formats.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is great. The more exposure OV gets, the closer we get to getting world wide acceptance of technology without legal overhead and high priced licensing.
-- Knuckle Blood : Official Lube of Team Rusty Nuts.
once iTunes supports Vorbis, then all the major players will support it. that means it will be ubiquitous, and anyone will be able to use .ogg without worrying about if someone has an ogg player.
talk to Apple if you want to see it happen: feedback page
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping. Support for Ogg is just too late to matter to anyone except for geeks on this site.
The only company whose support would make any difference is... MicroSoft. If they blessed Ogg, you might see players ship that can handle it. Otherwise, it's just a nerd's pipe dream. If fraunhoffer ever gets serious, maybe you'll see some games and similar things ship with Ogg's instead of mp3's. But this race is already run.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
... but, I made a pact with myself some years ago to never use any file format that was named in the Klingon language.
...
Seriously, the name is so stupid and embarrassing to say or read that I wonder if people won't resist it for that reason alone. I'm not being facetious here, either. I'm hesitent to listen to Ogg Vorbis format files because I would be too embarrassed to have to say "It's Ogg Vorbis" should someone ask me what I'm listening to
Real is too slow for me to use. I would rather not even use Real Player. But maybe this will allow for better support(somehow) and maybe some improvement in the player and the format itself.
Victory! First Real puts out a Linux version, then we learn that Real is going Open Source (and not just with their own stuff, but with Microsoft's as well), and now they embrace Ogg, the best codec ever!
It's good to see companies finally "get" Free Software. I am now going to Real's website to download the latest RealPlayer public alpha for $25, just to show my support for their recent behavior. I encourage every person in the world to do the same.
Linux rules!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
You've got a name like Ischo and you complain that Ogg Vorbis sounds stupid and embarrassing?!?
Infuriate left and right
When Ogg Vorbis 1.0 was released, I converted all my audio CD's to Ogg files. It looks as if the Ogg encoder is much faster than LAME with variable bitrate, but I haven't really compared them accurately.
I fear the issue with Ogg Vorbis is that it is not as known as MP3. OK, so Unreal2 uses Ogg Vorbis... but do you honestly believe most gamers really read the manual, and especially the credits? I wouldn't think so.
At my work, I told a few employees about Ogg Vorbis, and absolutely no one ever heard about it. Some even said: "Why would I want to use that? I have MP3 and it works fine!". They simply don't care about patents and such, they just want it to work...
Based upon this, I fear Ogg Vorbis will only be used by geeks. Maybe when major software like Nero can instantly create Ogg files and not just MP3 files when saving tracks, it will be more known by the masses.
Amen! RealOne was enough to make me know that I'll never install another new RealMedia product. I uninstalled it and found and old RealMedial player I had downloaded a year or so ago and reinstalled that. If I come across something it will not play and other players also can't handle it I'll pass that content by.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm involved in a beta test of a new product from Sonic|Blue, and one of the features I've requested is Ogg support (it probably won't make it into this product, but it is a possibility). I'm not alone in wanting it either, my motion was seconded by another beta tester.
Now if only my MP3/CD Player, one from iRiver, would support Ogg anytime soon I could have a complete solution.
I sent an email to SonicBlue asking if they were planning on adding support for ogg vorbis on the RioVolt SP250 via a firmware update. I received the following response:
Dear Valued Customer,
Nothing in the works yet. Maybe in the future.
Looks like I won't have portable oggs for a while.
I just looked around for something that would let me play ogg files on my Jornada, but I couldn't find anything. Does an application to do this exist?
I use my jornada as my portable audio player, even though it's not really very good as an MP3 player. If there was an app out there, I could switch to ogg without any trouble.
I thought geeks used Nero, and everyone else used Easy CD Creator.
Now not having a portable Ogg Vorbis player is a whole different story...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Oddly enough I heard nearly the same exact thing about mp3's 6-7 years ago...
If you knew my name, you'd bounce it right back at me :-)
Infuriate left and right
That was before anything like it existed. *now* we have MP3 already. Ogg is nothing special over that. If it was 10x better like mp3 was 10x better than wav or au as a storage format well then something might happen. But the two cases just are not the same.
avi/divx
classic...
What format do you think people will choose after hearing a few Ogg songs and seeing that they get much better quality than MP3 in less space? Hard disks might be cheap, but even with my quite decent 40GB disk I have to delete stuff every few months. Same for players, on a larger scale because there's less space available. Basically the choice with them will be filling it with lots of tiny songs that sound like crap, or have that same amount as Ogg with a very decent quality.
The evangelism tack to take here is that Ogg makes much smaller files for better quality. Like, 70% of the space. So they can fit a lot more on their hard disk, if their interest is their CD collection.
If their interest is filesharing, then obviously that's not going to work as well. But with WinAmp and Real supporting Oggs out the box, people will be able to use .ogg files they find. And if your favoured filesharing network doesn't have .ogg as an audio format, be sure to let the developers know!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Dagnabbit, I've somehow managed to develop a completely irrational impatience to see an "official" implementation, or at LEAST an official spec, for a reasonably free-as-in-speech video-in-ogg format, and now that Ogg/Vorbis 1.0 is out, I was hoping they'd get a chance to get at least a creaky alpha version of the VP3 code and ogg mux'er out Real Soon Now...but instead [from the press release]:
the Xiph.org Foundation will begin immediate work on the Ogg Vorbis plug-ins.Another distraction....
Hopefully, the potential for Theora to be used in RealPlayer/Server will spur some development on it soon, too. People are starting to get impatient, and unnofficial video-in-ogg is already appearing which may or may not be "compatible" with the official one, if it ever comes out....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
After seeing this thread I just made my first ventures into the Ogg world. After long advocating lame --r3mix and the lame --alt-preset insane, I have to say that Ogg sounds good at about half the file size at 128kbps. I'm so new I'm not quite sure what settings are used. I believe it is just a '-q 4' flag. Try it, you'll be impressed. If '-q 4' isn't sufficient for your needs, try '-q 6'.
Score one for the good guys. I'm pleased to say that MP3 jukebox thingie was listed at the Vorbis site long before the good news hit. It couldn't happpen to a nicer fish. -Scott
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I really never bothered learning much about ogg vs. mp3...I got a few mp3 around of songs I have to have, singles basically. I'm not like some with 1000+mps ......BUT the page you linked to with the comparison between ogg and mp3 WOW!!! Am I impressed, I have both ogg .wav's and the MP3 .wav looping in winamp.....(the .wav's are decompressed from each file format) If these examples are real....I'm going to start burning and moving everything over to ogg.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
That's fine. You've all read about the recent Forgent JPG thing. So you know that patented formats such as MP3 could easily be licensed for a reasonable fee. If you want to pay that fee then feel free to continue using MP3s. But don't complain when, in a few years, you find yourself converting hundreds of gigs of MP3s to some other format to avoid licensing costs and to maintain compatibility. You've been warned!
All we need is fraunhofer to assert patent rights over mp3 the way Forgent is asserting patent rights over jpeg. This stuff DOES happen, and perhaps the mere possibility of it happening will lead to the eventual wide adoption of Vorbis.
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Does anyone have a list of Ogg hardware players?
I have a "Riovolt" MP3 player that plays fullsize CDR-W's and has a good interface. I'm happy except for whatever ungodly WRONG reason it plays WMAs and not Oggs (okay, because the Ogg was not 1.0 at the time).
Now I'm very interested in hardware that has upgradeable firmware and has at least some plan to support Ogg in the future.
fifth sigma, inc.
hey funny little man, you funny little man, just call it ogg. That's what I do.
The format is Ogg. Vorbis is just the codec. So if you have multiple Ogg files, you have Oggs. Just like if you have multiple LAME-encoded MP3s, you have MP3s.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The fact that it's included in Winamp now is I think one of the most important factors for Ogg's adoption. I used to encode only in mp3, because when I sent files to a non-computer-literate friend, it'd be a pain in the ass to also send the Ogg plugin, explain how to install it, all the while being asked why my files can't be played by default Winamp like normal MP3s can be, etc. Now if I send an Ogg and they can't play it, I just say "your version of Winamp is too old; upgrade to the newest one," which is a concept even the most tech-illiterate person understands.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You know what's gonna convert everyone...
Multiple channels (254 is the limit I think) eventually with an almost limitless bit rate (currently 640kbps I think)...what this means is cheap and easy encoding of say 5.1 sound or a "poor man's" DTS. When cheap (sub $200) DVD-Rs become widely available, I expect to see this as the CODEC of choice for all non MPEG-2 video for that very reason.
It increases the size of the file, but as time goes on, size becomes less relevant.
While I've heard that OGG 1.0 sounds much better than the RCs, I haven't had a chance to hear it myself... In their infinite wisdom, they've decided that only Linux users get the privlidge of using Ogg. For any other platform, it has to be ported, for no good reason.
Secondly, Ogg is under the GPL (and the libs under the LGPL). That's reason enough to prevent a great number of people from using it in their applications. Read this post that explains quite well why standards and the GPL are mutually exclusive. The fact that the libs are LGPL'ed is an improvement, but still not good enough for many applications where Ogg could get wider support.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Real Networks, a software company that manufactures spyware, sees great promise from it's forthcoming zero-income products.
REALNETWORKS, INC. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT REALNETWORKS PRODUCTS REDISTRIBUTION NOT PERMITTED Software License for RealOne Player
x .html). RealNetworks does not share with third parties any personal information you provide in connection with our products without first obtaining your informed consent. 4. Financial information: Media Commerce Software does not interact with the process of secure financial transactions, e.g. credit card transactions. These transactions are handled by the website providing the content and are governed by that party's privacy policy. 5. Usage information: RealNetworks may keep statistics on the aggregated anonymous use of the Media Commerce Software. However, content partners using the Media Commerce Software will not provide RealNetworks with information on specific content for which an individual user obtains passes.....
AUTOMATIC COMMUNICATIONS FEATURES.
a) The Software consists of interactive Internet applications that perform a variety of communications over the Internet as part of their normal operation. A number of communications features are automatic and are enabled by default!!! By installing and/or using the Software, you consent to the Software's communications features. Once you log into the Software, user information including your user id will be sent in communications with RN's servers. This information is used to access your regular account, premium content, non-premium content, services, features, and other personalized services. RN may match the user id to personally identifiable information in order to provide you with products, services, and software that you're entitled to and to provide you with relevant information. You are responsible for any telecommunications or other connectivity charges incurred through use of the Software!!!
b) Cookies: The Software also allows the use of cookies....
c) AutoUpdate: The RealOne Player, using AutoUpdate, automatically communicates with RN's servers on the Internet to check for updates to RN's and RN partner's software, such as bug fixes, patches, enhanced functions, missing plug-ins and new versions. AutoUpdate also has the capability to run independently of RealOne Player to perform background update checks. RN may download updates during the background checks, when RealOne Player automatically communicates with RN's servers, when you manually check for updates, or when RealOne Player detects a file it does not support. AutoUpdate sends information about installed RealNetworks' products and components to the servers to determine upgrade availability. If you prefer to be notified when an auto-update is performed, follow these steps: On the Tools menu, select Preferences, AutoUpdate, and then de-select "Automatically download and install software updates." However, as we describe above, certain updates to RealOne Player functionality will happen automatically and without advance notification!
d) Message Center: The RealOne Player software, using Message Center, automatically communicates with RN's servers to check for new important messages, including software updates and service bulletins. Message Center can also run independently of RealOne Player to perform background new message checks. Message Center sends information about installed RealNetworks' products and components to the servers to allow receipt of suitable product update and other messages. Message Center is set by default to show message headlines and to check for messages once or twice a week. You can change the way messages are displayed and the frequency messages are checked by following these steps... If you sign up for services that send messages more often than the frequency you have selected, your frequency selection may be adjusted!
7. SCHEDULER. An application Scheduler, known as "evntsvc.exe," is installed along with RealOne Player. Once installed, it runs independently of RealOne Player....
8. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ("DRMs"). a) The Software includes a DRM called the RealSystem Media Commerce Update Software ("Media Commerce Software") and may include third party DRMs as Plug-in components, which are subject to their own license agreements. DRMs are designed to manage and enforce intellectual property rights in digital content purchased over the Internet. You may not take any action to circumvent or defeat the security or content usage rules provided or enforced by either the DRM or the Software. DRMs may be able to revoke your ability to use applicable content. RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content. RN is not responsible for any communications to or from any third party DRM provider, or for the collection or use of information by third party DRMs. You consent to the communications enabled and/or performed by the DRM, including automatic updating of the DRM without further notice, despite the provisions of AutoUpdate defined in Section 6(c). You agree to indemnify and hold harmless RN for any claim relating to your use of a third party DRM. b) Content providers are using the digital rights management technology contained in this Software to protect the integrity of their content("Secure Content") so that their intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. Owners of such Secure Content ("Secure Content Owners") may, from time to time, request RN or its suppliers to provide security related updates to the DRM components of the Software ("Security Updates") that may affect your ability to copy, display and/or utilize the Software. You therefore agree that, if you elect to download a license from the Internet which enables your use of Secure Content, RN or its suppliers may, in conjunction with such license, also download onto your computer such Security Updates that a Secure Content Owner has requested that RN or its suppliers distribute. Unless notification is provided to you, RN and its suppliers will not retrieve any personally identifiable information, or other information, from your computer by downloading such Security Updates. c) The Media Commerce Software allows you to receive and playback content that has been digitally secured by a content provider. The Media Commerce Software interacts with your computer in the following ways: 1. Hardware information: In order to download the appropriate software, RealOne Player must send certain anonymous information about the hardware on your computer to the RealNetworks download server. Once the software is installed, information about your hardware will not be stored on any server. Hardware information will also be sent for content passes, as described below. 2. Content passes: When obtaining passes for playback of content (such as a music or video file) in RealOne Player, information about your specific Media Commerce Software installation and hardware will be sent to the content provider for inclusion in the pass. This installation and hardware information will be scrambled a different way each time it is sent, usable only for inclusion in your pass. 3. Personal information: Media Commerce Software will not associate itself with any personal information in RealOne Player or anywhere else on your computer. RealNetworks' use of any personal information is governed by the RealNetworks privacy policy (http://www.realnetworks.com/company/privacy/inde
Got friends?
What are you talking about? GIFs are not lossy
The standard mode of Compuserve GIF(tm) with Unisys LZW(tm) Technology supports only 256 colors. To squeeze a 16-bit or 24-bit image into 256 colors requires a lossy operation called "color quantization." This can produce either banding (if no dithering is used) or noise that cannot be compressed (if error diffusion dithering is used).
You can actually get more than 256 colors in a GIF image, but you have to use multiple-image GIF to first draw a 16-color preview image, then add 255 new colors in each subsequent frame. That's OK for low-end high color (1K to 4K colors), but don't count on doing 24-bit true color that way.
PNG supports up to 48-bit color, compressed with zlib. The MNG extension supports everything in PNG plus animation and JPEG sprites (the latter to be removed if Forgent has its way).
Will I retire or break 10K?
the biggest browser of all, Internet Explorer, has broken alpha support! That's one of the biggest reasons why GIF isn't dead yet.
IE 5.x and later correctly support binary alpha channels in indexed PNG images. It just has problems with the deeper alpha channels used in grayscale and true-color images. Given that transparent GIF images are also indexed and also use binary alpha, I don't see any difference between IE's transparent PNG support and IE's transparent still GIF support that would preclude use of PNG images in web site graphics.
On the other hand, unlike Mozilla, even IE 6 does not support animated PNG images, which are called MNG. This is the real reason why PNG hasn't taken off on the web, because it can't be used to deliver animated advertisements.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sure it will. Smaller files -> faster download times.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
most experienced users refuse to have it on their machines at all. Just b/c they are including OV doesn't mean their Player won't suck anymore and stop freezing up machines.
If you're concerned about sound quality, you are not listening to compressed audio of any sort.
Tell that to the r3mix team, who achieved transparent reproduction of audio using the LAME MP3 encoder at under 192 kbps.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of significant irony is that JPG itself may soon be revoked as a standard (lame software patents tick me off), and PNG *appears* to be the only legitimate replacement candidate.
PNG is not a legitimate replacement because it doesn't have any frequency-domain quantization support; it supports color quantization only in the spatial domain, which isn't as efficient. Spatial color quantization (i.e. dithering to 8-bit) can't go much lower than 4 bits per pixel after the lossless phase.
Try JPEG2000 (.jp2). Those who have claimed IP on JPEG2000 have agreed to license their patents royalty-free. And this time, ISO has probably learned its lesson and isn't going to let anybody sell a patent to a third party such as Forgent who plans to terminate the royalty-free license.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As for the GPL/LGPL argument: we've already a hardware player, lots of software players/editors with plugin support for the ogg/vorbis... It's the "marketshare" that's holding it back more than anything.
Bah, I should stop feeding the troll.
Was that integer decoding library thing for ogg ever worked out?
Xiph.org finances development of Ogg media technology by selling shared-source licenses for a proprietary fixed-point Vorbis decoder. (Fixed-point math is an approximation to floating-point math using the integer arithmetic instructions of a DSP.) But now that Ogg Vorbis 1.0 is out and that the help file contains the complete Vorbis audio layer I specification, you'll probably see a couple fixed-point ports of Xiph.org's reference decoder pop up on the usual sites.
Will I retire or break 10K?
a name like Darth Vadar. Or Fu Manchu? Ogg is an interesting name and that makes it appealing and actually, pretty damn easy to market. Why's that, you say? Well, because Ogg Vorbis can just about mean any damn thing you want it to.
Can we actually turn ogg past mp3 by including a checksum verifier that tags each file and can tell if you have the full version of a file. EX if i rip "Blah's greatest hits" and put it on a file sharing server, could it have a way of saying that everything is there when a person get the files. Also start a database of known ripped items. This would eliminate bad song files. Can we make the format more complete than a better than mp3 mp3? Also start a native file sharing system that would be otimized for the OGG format and support TRUE "Streaming" while saving, etc and would mask user information so file sharing would turn back to it's Total Anonyomus state. EX open the software, type in the artist, it goes to the artist database, sends a request to other unknown users with a IP and it would send the file to the ip in a special protocal. See, it's somewhat of a central server, except for the only information it has is IP's and it dosent handle downloads, it simply takes a code for a file and sends it out to other clients and tells their software to send the file to the User. simple filesharing, but if implemented could be better than gnutella (similar) but less bloated and more precise.
If your using windows, and you want to disable real spyware, this is how you do it. Ever wonder why real player gives you updates when you tell it not to run on startup?
W indows\Curr entVersion\Run
Registry Key Location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\
Key Name: TkBellExe
Value: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Update_OB\evntsvc.exe -osboot
delete evntsvc.exe, everything will still function fine.
I'll bite.
In theory, how would one go about using this information ?
All I see is a three letter code associated with each album.
Ummm, lets see... ads, schlock-talk, drive-time crud, ads, more ads, still more ads, and every now and again, some piece of top-40 junk.
Music is most likely NOT the #1 thing transmitted over FM radio signals.
Oh boy, what now, you're going to post statistics telling us what's the most transmitted information over FM? His point was simple and he made it, this level of nitpicking usually means you've got nothing to contribute and it's time to shut up.
- sigs are for wimps.
Games using mp3 do NOT require $ for license. You read right. MP3 for games does not require a payment for the license, just use it. Check Thompsons if you doubt.
Their "Linux/Unix" section only means "Linux", and it might as well be labeled that way. It will not compile on anything else without porting and patching. Most software players that include Ogg support are GPLed anyhow (and often Linux only). My contention is that the license is helping to hold back marketshare. Besides, the lack of portability of their software sure doesn't help. I wouldn't be posting at +2 if I was a Troll. My Karma wouldn't be at the max, if I was a troll.
Is it just that you (and the user that moderated down my original post) just dislike any messages that don't reflect your own view?
If you don't like it, call it a Troll.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What makes you REALLY think ogg is patent-free? It can very easily be tied up in the courts for a very, very long time, at any time, and then where will you be? Pick your medicine: mp3, a known and clean format, or ogg, a complete unknown, and not for hi-fi use anyway.
> Yes, Binaries... Most likely much patching has
:)
> taken place to get those binaries built. I'm
> talking about platforms that the source compiles
> on, without the need to independently port it.
Nope. It's easily compiled with MSVC, ICL, and GCC under Cygwin.
> Their "Linux/Unix" section only means "Linux",
> and it might as well be labeled that way. It
> will not compile on anything else without porting
> and patching.
Nope. Vorbis-tools compiles cleanly out of the box in Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. I'm sure others as well, but these are the platforms I've personally tried.
> Most software players that include Ogg support
> are GPLed anyhow (and often Linux only)
How about the DirectShow filters that add OGG support to WiMP?
"Everyone else" has switched to Nero by now... Easy CD Creator is actually harder to use than Nero, with those wizards that instead of helping make things more confusing.
I think everyone knows the difference between an Audio and Data Cd by now...
with Apple high on 'open standards'
one could always hope.
-
Most MP3 decoders suck. Try listening to MP3s through MAD and see what you are missing.
slashdot!=valid HTML
The encoders are the biggest factors. There are still people encoding with Blade or old Xing encoders. Yuck, really bad. Lame is the only way to go. Yes, I'm very familiar with MAD and it's a great project, hopefully Rob will make a great fixed point Ogg Vorbis decoder too, now that the spec. is published.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
I'm not going to rehash the several posts from before that explain in detail why Real sucks. It does. That's a fact.
To think that it's a victory for OGG that another 'mainstreme' app supports it is assinine.
All this means is, if you have to install Real for certian media, it will take over the file extension and it will take that much longer to load and that much more tracking of your online habits.
We need to stop cheering whenever some big, sloppy crappy application takes a shine to an otherwise good format, and start enjoying the format as it stands.
The Internet is generally stupid
Sure it will. Smaller files -> faster download times.
I mean in terms of critical mass of users, and of program defaults. A lot of filesharing apps and networks either don't share .ogg at all as yet, or don't recognise it as an audio format by default.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
... who were trialing Ogg earlier this year (and still have ogg feeds up from time to time). They have taken stick in the GB press for adopting Real as their primary format for streaming (because Real player decides to take over granny's computer, etc.).
If all the people who've sacrificed their computers to Real Player could listen to ogg feeds with just an automatic codec update, then it would strengthen the case of those inside the Beeb promoting "free" formats.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
How long did it take Forgent to realize it even had a possible patent claim... 10 years?
Forgent bought a set of patents. Eighteen months later, Forgent legal realized 1. that one of its patents covered JPEG, and 2. that the company was not party to any contract mandating royalty-free licensing. ISO members must license patents that cover ISO standards under RF or RAND terms. The previous owner of the patents was an ISO member; Forgent isn't.
Who cares if the picture grows an extra 5% because it lacks a certain dithering algorithm?
Not 5%. 500%.
the lack of your pet quantizer is largely irrelvant.
You don't understand. The human visual system converts received images partially to the frequency domain. Without a quantizer that works on data in the frequency domain (such as JPEG's DCT followed by integer division), you're not going to be able to store images efficiently.
won't notice the extra 2 seconds it takes to download porn with PNG, but will scream bloody murder for the minute involved with GIF
GIF and 256-color PNG use similar technology (uncompressed palette data, then lossless Lempel-Ziv* compression of color indices) and produce similar file sizes to within 10%. A 24-color PNG is in essence a gzipped 24-bit BMP file.
* PNG uses Deflate, a variation of LZSS, an LZ77 (window based) algorithm. GIF uses LZW, an LZ78 (dictionary based) algorithm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Has anyone tried this listening test. Man I am doing it right now and I am awed by the quality of the ogg vorbis compression. On one of the tests 3 were obvious compression artifacts and 2 I couldn't determine which was the compressed one and which was the real one. Both of those ended up being ogg formats. If the highs in the song are fairly constant with some busy lows like in blackwater and flooressence it seems that the other compressions fail miserably but ogg shines through. Great work vorbis dudes. When my band releases some of its new songs on the net they will be in ogg format.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant