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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!
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.
I beg to differ. Although MP3 is firmly entrenched, the vast amount of encoders available ensures that an MP3 cannot be judged by bitrate. I know of several people who would be overjoyed to see a "real" standard for audio, with an official encoder. Just one encoder. Not an official one and lots of spinoffs. If the encoder is done right, and is free, open-source, and open to outside contribution, then there are no reason for spinoffs. This ensures identical quality across the board.
Why is this important? File-sharing networks. I HATE downloading a 192 kbps MP3, and finding it to sound like a 96 kbps one made by LAME.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I personally don't really give a shit if little Johnny down the street is using ogg or not.
What matter to me is wether I'm using ogg or not and at the moment the answer is yes. All of the cds that I rip are ripped into ogg.
And when I download music I don't care the slightest bit wether it's in mp3 or ogg because if I really like it I'll go buy the album and then I'll rip it into ogg. If I don't like it enough to buy the album then I don't like it enough to want it in a better format either so it doesn't matter.
The only thing I would like to see regarding ogg is portable ogg players (that also support mp3 of course) and other devices like dvd players etc. But with Real and AOL blessing ogg maybe that's not a pipe dream afterall?
Just because I prefer a certain format doesn't mean other people need to prefer the same.
--
Garett
As long as there are companies like Forgent who try to claim frivolous patent royalties on formats that are for all intensive purposes the de facto standards, there will be a market for OSS products. In the compressed audio arena, this is Ogg Vorbis' greatest benefit, and one that may ultimately be its raison d'etre.
.ogg files vs. .wma and .mp3 files, and with little tweaking, .ogg is as good if not better than the heavily tweaked competitors. It seems to be the better choice overall. Acceptance will only be limited by usage.
Additionally, I've heard the comparisons of
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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.
You remember back in like 97 when low quality Real-Audio streams were the rage and mp3 was like this new weird thing that nobody really knew about? (at least amongst me + geeks i knew)
there is NO reason Ogg can't take over as the de-facto standard. especially if it really is a better format.
sure, it might not be tomorrow but with the increasing ease of switching (i.e. with all this new software support), mp3 is _anything_ but entrenched and could be uprooted with half of users not even knowing what file type they are playing.