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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.
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
You know, I'm pretty sure the author is trying to be sarcastic here. Am I wrong? Other repliers don't seem to be getting that.
In my observation, Real is just another MS Borg type operation - they don't want to give you generalized utilities and leave you alone to make the decisions - they want to own internet audio, eliminate all other choices, lock everyone in and collect data on them.
For me and audio, it's been WINAMP all the way for years. Elegance, flexibility, extesibility and ease of use. It whips the Real Llama's posterior. But I am worried that AOL will spoil Winamp (CRINGE "You've Got Audio!" /CRINGE) as they get more involved. I haven't tried Winamp 3 and their video support yet. And I'm not mentioning Media Player because I was taught not to swear.
"The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan
This Sig has been depreciated.
Why is ogg any more strange as a word than egg?
Once people get used to it, it will be ok.
At least it's a word, and not an acronym.
Bah, you could have said the same thing about mp3 4 years ago. ....
"Is that a CD?" (you probably could have said the same thing about CDs too, but I won't)
"No, it's mp3"
"What is an mp3?"
"Mpeg layer 3, it's compressed audio"
"Oh, aren't those illegal?"
"Some of them, not all of them"
"Oh, then can I have some?"
"Sure"
"I put it in my CD player and it didn't work."
"No, you need an mp3 player"
[continues]
Those were back in the days when you got all your mp3s searhing on altavista and doing http transfers. Even before the ratio FTP servers. It was hardcore.
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!