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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!
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
... 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
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.
A few years ago, you could have said the same thing about PNG. Now, every major image editor supports it, as do all the major image viewers and web browsers.
The existence of a defacto standard doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to improve on that standard.
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
RealNetworks will be releasing the Helix DNA client software as open source in 88 days. This represents a media engine that can be used to build streaming media players. Today's announcement means that Ogg Vorbis support should be ready in time for RealNetworks' own open source release. For more details, visit the Helix Web site! We're interested in collecting input on Helix and what we can do to work better with the open source community.
----------
Mark Murphy, Helix Community Manager
CollabNet, Inc.
http://www.helixcommunity.org
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.
Nope, software developers as well, esp. game developers. You have to pay scratch if your compressed audio is MP3 (good old Thompson Multimedia want their cut), so OGG actually does pretty well in that niche.
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.
Now not having a portable Ogg Vorbis player is a whole different story...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
And if CD ripping were the only function of compressed audio, you might have a point. But Vorbis has some genuine, big advantages for streaming audio. A single file, for instance, can be streamed at different bitrates without modification, so you can easily adjust the rate to each user according to his connection speed. There's also no licensing fee, which might be enough to make the difference between being profitable or not to the streaming company. And, of course, Vorbis is supposed to give better sound quality at a given bitrate, so more connections can be supported for a given bandwidth.
As long as a format gives advantages for the producer or distributor of files, there will be a reason for files to be generated in that format. Now that the biggest obstacle to using Vorbis- the lack of ubiquitous players- has been eliminated, those producers and distributors can start taking advantage. It doesn't matter whether Joe User understands why he should want to switch to Vorbis if the people who are generating the files he listens to have already made the decision for him.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Actually, it's the defacto standard for file sharing. For ripping your own CDs, you'd be a fool to stick to mp3 - you can get much better sound in less disk space with Ogg. One place Ogg really needs support is in CD ripping applications, like AudioCatalyst.
See what you can do with your filesharing app to get it to share and search .ogg files - and if it doesn't, lobby the programmers.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
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.
There is already some maintainance work going on with the VP3 code, but you are right - converting the code over to use the Ogg framework will take a little time.
... it's not particularly hard to write a plugin :)
The projected timeframe at the moment is to have everything ready by next summer.
Writing a Vorbis plugin for Real will not serious impact this work
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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