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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.
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
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 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.
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...
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
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.
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
REALNETWORKS, INC. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT REALNETWORKS PRODUCTS REDISTRIBUTION NOT PERMITTED Software License for RealOne Player
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AUTOMATIC COMMUNICATIONS FEATURES.
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7. SCHEDULER. An application Scheduler, known as "evntsvc.exe," is installed along with RealOne Player. Once installed, it runs independently of RealOne Player....
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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
If Ogg doesn't already have something of the likes built in it should be pretty trivial to add an MD5 metadata tag for the Vorbis part of the stream.
I think.
So it'd just be a matter of support for it.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
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
Two seperate patent searches: one paid for by Xiph itself, and another paid for by AOL which had to pass before they would allow the Vorbis encoder/decoder into Winamp.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
The Ogg and Vorbis libraries are under a modified BSD licence, *not* GPL or LGPL. Very early versions were GPL, but this was changed at least 18 months ago.
Please pick some other FUD to spread - this one isn't valid any more.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... 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
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant