Posted by
timothy
on from the rollin'-rollin'-rollin' dept.
bdesham writes "Mac OS X Hints has a story about a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
-- autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is great
by
seanadams.com
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.
Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".
Re:This is great
by
mosch
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's an excellent point, but there's another more important one. 95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap. They're not going to pay an extra $50 or $100 for an ogg-enabled iPod, and the general public doesn't give a fuck (flying or otherwise) about ogg, so they won't pay anything extra for ogg support.
So why would anybody support it? Until the costs of implementing ogg are damned near close to $0, nobody's going to spend the time and money implementing the code, integrating it all, testing it and supporting it.
Re:This is great
by
rseuhs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better. In listening tests from heise.de, 64kbps oggs were closer to the original (or better) than 128kbps mp3s. (And it was the best codec of all, better than WMA, AAC and MP3pro.)
So if the hardware manufacturers support ogg, they can say that their device holds 2*x songs instead of x. If you buy such a device would you go for the one that holds 1000 songs or the other that holds 2000 songs if they cost the same?
Also, the hardware vendors sure don't want to pay for mp3 forever so it's in their interest that another format replaces it. (Even if it takes a long time - like a decade or even longer.)
So I'd say ogg is "better enough".
Re:This is great
by
andrewski
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap.
I would LOVE to see you try to quantify that statement. I would guess that most Ogg fanboys are actually the dudes who had iPods (or another mp3 player) LONG before J-Lo and Tony Hawk and all your other standard consumers did. You know, the early adopters. The people who spend MORE money on gadgets than anyone else.
Try again.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the greatest...
by
asparagus
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
H0re of them all?
Actually, I've never done this. But on the (off) chance you guys/. his server, here's a mirror.
Re:About damn time!
by
bahamat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.
But 100% of what I rip myself is ogg. And that's what I want to take with me. Not some crap riped with poor hardware at low bitrate by Joe Blow in MP3 format.
Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhere?
by
SexyKellyOsbourne
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The.ogg file format is open source, portable, stable, and has no legal bindings whatsover, unlike mp3s -- what prevents hardware companies from doing a few quick source code cut n' pastes and adding a feature? ROMs are cheap enough that adding ogg support would even be trivial on the hardware end.
I and many others have over 100GB of ogg files on my hd, and I'd really like to see more support for them by hardware manufacturers -- there is no reason they can't do it.
ogg may be great...
by
nuckin+futs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
but how many portable players actually support it?
Not New!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
There has been a quicktime plugin for ogg-vorbis since well before it went 1.0 (actually, IIRC there were two of them, and if this is a new one, now there are three).
I am so sick of people complaining about things that they just assume quicktime/itunes/etc can't do.
Your ignorance is not an excuse to apple-bash people!
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Did it ever occur to you that maybe just apple doesn't support ogg because there's no demand for it from their customers?
What just about nobody realizes about apple is that they are vastly, vastly under-resourced. They just don't have the people to spare. They probably aren't going to go and add support for a poorly documented format that no one within their walls are familiar with because a bunch of linux-using slashdotters that probably won't buy an ipod anyway go "hey, it would be so cool if apple would do this".
No. Apple doesn't care about what would be "cool". They generally don't care about *anything*, really, but when they do they care about what would attract people to their platform, they care about finding new ways for people to use their computers, and they care about giving their customers what they want. I've yet to meet one person with an ipod who actually gave a shit one way or the other about ogg support. So if the customers don't care, why should apple bother?
Why don't we all just reverse-engineer the ipod firmware so we can add games and ogg support and a game boy emulator?
Re:About damn time!
by
cygnus
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?
it probably isn't... once apple works out some licensing stuff, it'll probably support AAC.
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance. and a lot of people pooh pooh it because the head to head tests always show ogg coming out on top. but this is largely because they're all done at like 64kbit, where ogg shines. AAC shines at 128kbit, where it reportedly is acoustically transparent when encoded with CD-quality source.
ideally, they'd provide functionality for both formats, but i doubt they will, because they're already wedded to AAC with Quicktime's MPEG-4 capabilities.
-- Just raise the taxes on crack.
What, are you a moron?
by
BigumD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yeah, I' bet there's a huge number of Apple users who rip their music to OGG when there's no available player for it on their platform.
And before you tell me that there is some obsucre player for it, reminder that your AVERAGE Mac user isn't going to know about anything that isn't made by Apple, and sure as hell isn't going to FINK something.
This isn't a step forward until it's built into iTunes.
-- --The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetoric...
by
loply
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
Don't read slashdot much, do you?
by
billybob
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everytime there's a discussion on mp3s here it always turns into a "i like ogg better waaaaa" "i like mp3 better waaaa" bitchfest.
I dont give a flying fuck if ogg is better personally, I already have way too much time (encoding 100s of cds) and money ($400 ipod) invested in mp3's. Besides, both LAME and iTunes encode mp3's that sound VERY nice at 192kbps... lots of mp3s you get from the internet sound like crap because they're encoded by Little Billy (age 7) or smoeone really stupid who doesnt know how to change the default settings in their crappy encoder. These are the mp3's everyone hears and says "oh mp3 sucks!".. but the ones I encode, I can't tell apart from the CD.
I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
-- Joseph?
Re:About damn time!
by
rseuhs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.
So?
When I rip a CD (yes, there are still people who buy CDs) I rip it to ogg becuase I can get better quality on less disk space.
What is wrong with that?
Re:About damn time!
by
tuffy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance.
Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.
I'll stick with an open format, personally.
--
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Re:MP3Pro
by
c13v3rm0nk3y
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...ur copying illegally the songs so get over it.
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
-- --
clvrmnky
It has never been about what is "better"
by
slantyyz
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ideological dogma aside, success in marketplace adoption has never been about survival of the fittest. It's about being first to saturate the market.
I don't think I need to give examples, but Beta vs VHS, Windows vs. everything else, MP3 vs Ogg, blah, blah.
If Ebola were to kill everyone on the planet, would it matter if a newer, deadlier (and arguably better) virus appeared on earth?
Where do you get the idea that Ogg enthusiasts are cheap? All signs to me would point in the opposite direction:
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
Troy
...but your assumptions are incorrect.
by
xiphmont
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us:-)
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
You are not suggesting that users will just accept having to re-encode all their music as OGG, are you? MP3-players will have to be around for a long time. There is no money saved in the short run (or even medium run).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size.
Just like they will quickly notice that they can't share their songs with anyone else, can't just download them easily from P2P networks and can't use their songs on various MP3-players.
just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
The difference is that the Mac has some very big advantages, while OGG has only two small ones: - Free - Small
Those don't offset the disadvantages for 99.9% of the population. Being free doesn't matter much because we don't directly pay for the encoder and the cost isn't that high to begin with. Being small doesn't matter much when you can't download OGG-encoded music. Storage prices are so low that it hardly matters to have a 2 instead of 4 MB song.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.
Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".
H0re of them all?
/. his server, here's a mirror.
Actually, I've never done this. But on the (off) chance you guys
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~skoonce/ogg_mirror/
99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.
But 100% of what I rip myself is ogg. And that's what I want to take with me. Not some crap riped with poor hardware at low bitrate by Joe Blow in MP3 format.
The .ogg file format is open source, portable, stable, and has no legal bindings whatsover, unlike mp3s -- what prevents hardware companies from doing a few quick source code cut n' pastes and adding a feature? ROMs are cheap enough that adding ogg support would even be trivial on the hardware end.
I and many others have over 100GB of ogg files on my hd, and I'd really like to see more support for them by hardware manufacturers -- there is no reason they can't do it.
but how many portable players actually support it?
Sony for example, is in tight with Microsoft.
Those two companies hate each other.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There has been a quicktime plugin for ogg-vorbis since well before it went 1.0 (actually, IIRC there were two of them, and if this is a new one, now there are three).
I am so sick of people complaining about things that they just assume quicktime/itunes/etc can't do.
Your ignorance is not an excuse to apple-bash people!
Did it ever occur to you that maybe just apple doesn't support ogg because there's no demand for it from their customers?
What just about nobody realizes about apple is that they are vastly, vastly under-resourced. They just don't have the people to spare. They probably aren't going to go and add support for a poorly documented format that no one within their walls are familiar with because a bunch of linux-using slashdotters that probably won't buy an ipod anyway go "hey, it would be so cool if apple would do this".
No. Apple doesn't care about what would be "cool". They generally don't care about *anything*, really, but when they do they care about what would attract people to their platform, they care about finding new ways for people to use their computers, and they care about giving their customers what they want. I've yet to meet one person with an ipod who actually gave a shit one way or the other about ogg support. So if the customers don't care, why should apple bother?
Why don't we all just reverse-engineer the ipod firmware so we can add games and ogg support and a game boy emulator?
it probably isn't... once apple works out some licensing stuff, it'll probably support AAC.
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance. and a lot of people pooh pooh it because the head to head tests always show ogg coming out on top. but this is largely because they're all done at like 64kbit, where ogg shines. AAC shines at 128kbit, where it reportedly is acoustically transparent when encoded with CD-quality source.
ideally, they'd provide functionality for both formats, but i doubt they will, because they're already wedded to AAC with Quicktime's MPEG-4 capabilities.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Yeah, I' bet there's a huge number of Apple users who rip their music to OGG when there's no available player for it on their platform.
And before you tell me that there is some obsucre player for it, reminder that your AVERAGE Mac user isn't going to know about anything that isn't made by Apple, and sure as hell isn't going to FINK something.
This isn't a step forward until it's built into iTunes.
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
"enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
loply.com
Everytime there's a discussion on mp3s here it always turns into a "i like ogg better waaaaa" "i like mp3 better waaaa" bitchfest.
I dont give a flying fuck if ogg is better personally, I already have way too much time (encoding 100s of cds) and money ($400 ipod) invested in mp3's. Besides, both LAME and iTunes encode mp3's that sound VERY nice at 192kbps... lots of mp3s you get from the internet sound like crap because they're encoded by Little Billy (age 7) or smoeone really stupid who doesnt know how to change the default settings in their crappy encoder. These are the mp3's everyone hears and says "oh mp3 sucks!".. but the ones I encode, I can't tell apart from the CD.
I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
Joseph?
So?
When I rip a CD (yes, there are still people who buy CDs) I rip it to ogg becuase I can get better quality on less disk space.
What is wrong with that?
Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.
I'll stick with an open format, personally.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
-- clvrmnky
Ideological dogma aside, success in marketplace adoption has never been about survival of the fittest. It's about being first to saturate the market.
I don't think I need to give examples, but Beta vs VHS, Windows vs. everything else, MP3 vs Ogg, blah, blah.
If Ebola were to kill everyone on the planet, would it matter if a newer, deadlier (and arguably better) virus appeared on earth?
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
Troy
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
:-)
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us
Monty
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
You are not suggesting that users will just accept having to re-encode all their music as OGG, are you? MP3-players will have to be around for a long time. There is no money saved in the short run (or even medium run).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size.
Just like they will quickly notice that they can't share their songs with anyone else, can't just download them easily from P2P networks and can't use their songs on various MP3-players.
just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper
The difference is that the Mac has some very big advantages, while OGG has only two small ones:
- Free
- Small
Those don't offset the disadvantages for 99.9% of the population. Being free doesn't matter much because we don't directly pay for the encoder and the cost isn't that high to begin with. Being small doesn't matter much when you can't download OGG-encoded music. Storage prices are so low that it hardly matters to have a 2 instead of 4 MB song.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi