Ogg Now An RFC

Logic writes "The Ogg bitstream format (used by Ogg Vorbis) has been enshrined in RFC 3533, "The Ogg Encapsulation Format Version 0", for all you folks who won't look at something unless it has an RFC attached to it."

Comments

Yippie

[ergonal]

This is great, well done to all the xiph guys. Remember to show your support by tax-deductibly donating.

Re:Yippie

[mindriot]

On a side note, there has also been a second RFC (RFC 3534) published regarding the application/ogg media type.

Isn't an RFC a request for comment?

[unixwin]

If so, what can one comment on the Ogg stream if its already well defined?
I thought RFC's were proposals for eliciting peer comments/reviews??

Re:Isn't an RFC a request for comment?

[OverlordQ]

When the RFCs were first produced, they had an almost 19th century
character to them - letters exchanged in public debating the merits
of various design choices for protocols in the ARPANET. As email and
bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the network, the
far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make
increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion -
reducing the need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some
respects, leaving historians somewhat impoverished in the process.
RFCs slowly became conclusions rather than debates.

Straight from RFC 2555

Re:What are the odds that Ogg will replace mp3?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has already replaced mp3 in most games, as OGG is free as in beer to use.

Re:Can't wait for

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody considering this should note that RFC1149 has been superceded by RFC2549, countering data loss to hawks and the like.

Remember what an RFC is

[bigberk]

An RFC is a "Request For Comment", a technical specification document put forward by anybody. As wikipedia puts it, "Few RFCs are standards but all Internet standards are recorded in RFCs."

So what am I getting at is, realize that this hasn't been adopted as some Internet standard overnight. But it's very positive for the project to have such a well defined standards document in a familiar format!

Re:Remember what an RFC is

[shaitand]

Nope, is Request for Comment, started in the days when letters were passed around before email and other electronic forms of communication came into existance. Now an RFC is a generally a final definition rather than an introduction.

Re:Hopefully

[millette]

Actually, Tremor, the integer codec, took care of that over a ago according to the changelog. And it's released under a bsd-like license.

Re:Hopefully

[bobm17ch]

I`m afraid this won`t affect player support much. The device (pc/mp3player/whatever) still has to support the vorbis audio codec within the ogg wrapper. Think of ogg as a bag of revels. The bag is standardised and easy to manipulate, but you just don`t know what you`re gonna get inside. Or even if you are gonna be able to handle it :) [1] [1] I can`t decode the orange revels. My codec empties the contents of the buffer through the I/O. :p

Re:Hopefully

[millette]

That casts a shadow over my previous response... I'm never careful enough separating ogg and vorbis; like tcp and ip, really.

Re:Well

[ergonal]

As you wish. CDex has native CD->Ogg ripping support.

Re:Well

[arkanes]

CDex can rip to ogg. It's also the best CD ripper for windows, hands down. It's also open source, which is cool.

http://www.cdex.n3.net

Re:Now if only it had a decent name

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you should bring this up... It's amazing how much more quality you can squeeze out of your EXISTING MP3 collection just by getting some better audio hardware. Before anyone starts taking my advice too far and goes to their local "overpriced audiophile extreme" store, here's how you can get GOOD sound INEXPENSIVELY:

* Get a good sound card. As a general rule, onboard audio stinks. The Audigy is popular - I personally don't like the way it sounds, so YMMV. Try the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz [epinions.com].

* Good speakers can be expensive. Good headphones aren't. Next time RadioShack has the Pro 35's [epinions.com] on sale, pick up a pair for $19.

* Try a few different MP3 players - quality varies. If you're a Windows user, don't waste your time with players that are basically just DirectShow front-ends, they'll ALL sound the same.

Re:Now if only it had a decent name

[be-fan]

Well, technically, the codec is Vorbis, which is a pretty cool name, if you ask me.

Re:Zero?

[DarkBlack]

It almost sounds like that you are suggesting that Winamp doesn't support ogg vorbis. It does.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Not quite.

For starters it's DNAT, not DAT.
It's --to, not --to-destination.
Finally, you can't use domain names in the NAT fields, so you'd need the ip address of the goatse.cx webserver.

Urge... to kill... rising....

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of $Deity, it's Ogg !! Not OGG, Ogg! Capital O, small g, small g!

Name origins.

[Anonymous Coward]

The name origins are explained here.

Re:Hopefully

[damiam]

EAC will work fine with Ogg, just download the encoder and point EAC to it. Alternately, you can use CDex or any number of other programs.

Re:Ogg or OGG?

[.com b4 .storm]

Why do the RFC page headers say "OGG" instead of "Ogg"? The headers in other RFCs aren't arbitrarily capitalized. It's hard enough convincing people that Ogg isn't an acronym without the RFC itself making our work harder.

Can they fix this without issuing a new RFC number?

To quote the RFC FAQ:

4) How can I correct an error in a published RFC?
You cannot! Once an RFC is published, it cannot be changed.
[...]
For both technical and editorial errors, the RFC Editor provides a list of errata for published RFCs. This page contains a list of errors that have been reported to the RFC Editor.

Re:Hopefully

[pslam]

Actually, Tremor, the integer codec, took care of that over a ago according to the changelog. And it's released under a bsd-like license.

Unfortunately Tremor isn't a one-size-fits-all. It's got nasty things like dynamic memory allocation all over the shop and still a rather large memory overhead. Actually, to be 100% compliant with the Vorbis 1.0 spec it's rather difficult to turn out a fast and small implementation (I've been trying).

At the moment I'm working on getting my own implementation working with an extremely small RAM overhead. It's by no means trivial getting it working on the DSPs you find in most MP3 players, and almost none of the source code to Tremor could be successfully ported to them either. I don't expect any of the source code I'm writing for my own implementation to be used as anything but a reference for writing a version to run on DSPs.

Of course, it would have been much more difficult even starting to write my own implementation were it not for freely available specs.

Re:Status of Ogg FLAC ?

[Hatta]

Ogg FLAC works. Just use the --ogg flag to flac. What I can't figure out is why you'd want to.

Re:Hopefully

[i_am_nitrogen]

Grip is absolutely the most awesome separate ripper I've ever used. It has database lookup, support for lame/bladeenc/oggenc and I think a few others, fully customizable file naming/directory structure, and the UI is actually pretty decent (once you get used to the "tabs-within-tabs" stuff that one of my former coworkers would always get really peeved about).

I'm not aware of any jukebox-like software for Linux, but with grip it's less necessary, as it sorts rips by album and artist if you want it to.

Re:Status of Ogg FLAC ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Ogg FLAC works. Just use the --ogg flag to flac. What I can't figure out is why you'd want to.

1. Rip all CDs, etc to FLAC, a lossless format.
2. Convert FLAC files to MP3, Vorbis, whatever. Keep FLAC files around.
3. New! Improved!! codec appears. You MUST have it, so you get it.
4. Convert FLAC files to New!Improved! format. No transcoding of, say an MP3 collection, so no loss of quality from the originals.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat as time goes by and progress occurs.

IETF Standards Process

[Luminous Coward]

Before they became RFCs, RFC 3533 and RFC 3534 were IETF Internet-Drafts, respectively known as draft-pfeiffer-ogg-fileformat-02 and draft-walleij-ogg-mediatype-08. RFC 3533 is Informational and RFC 3534 is on the Standards Track.

[RFC3533] The Ogg Encapsulation Format Version 0, Silvia Pfeiffer, May 2003.
[RFC3534] The application/ogg Media Type, Linus Walleij, May 2003.

The Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

In quality terms, it doesn't get any better than EAC. (Unfortunate, and some of us are working on bringing CDex up to that standard.)

There's a Standard for using that to make very, very good rips that should be indistinguishable from the original to just about anyone's ears and beat the pants off anything from Kazaa or even 192kbps FastEnc CBR "scene releases" from Usenet or IRC. I won't tell you the exact name of the standard. Rumour has it there are least three private networks, probably more, dedicated to it, but I don't know the details - only how you can get your own rips to sound great so you can put your CDs away safely and never have to get them out again:

• Rip with Exact Audio Copy 0.9 beta 4 (not the prebetas, they're broken). We've tested and nothing else as good, even cdparanoia. (Sorry, it's Windows. Either try Wine or add Secure Mode to a Free Software ripper and let Hydrogen Audio (the doom9 of audio) et al test it for a few months before you even consider using it.)
• Use Secure Mode, accurate stream, with NO C2 (even if your drive can do it), and disable the cache. (That's Secure Mode, Accurate Stream, Drive Caches Audio Data but NOT Drive is capable of retreiving C2.) Resync on track boundaries. Error Recovery Quality: High. Gap Detection Secure, Strategy any of A, B or C (try changing if you get a "protected" CD that won't rip). Speed Actual (which is usually max), allow speed reduction during extraction as many drives are more reliable reading scratched bits at lower speeds (this way it'll slow down only if it needs to, trying to read through a scratch). You may find spinning up first helps reading some CDs.
• Skip tracks on read or sync errors. You'll get clicks if you don't and you're better off cleaning the CDs than that.
• Do NOT normalise. Ever. (If you want replay gaining, let your Vorbis decoder do that on decoding, but NEVER do it before encoding!)
• On Unknown CDs, automatically access online freedb database. There are sometimes errors, so crosscheck the titles with the case - for correct year and genre, use Allmusic - it's right more often than you are.
• Create an m3u on extraction, and start 1 compressor queued in the background (with no window, after you've got it working) for each processor in your machine, plus 1 if you're hyperthreaded (I use 5). Remember not to close EAC until after there are no files queued for encoding!
• For the naming scheme, use: %A - %C\%A - %C - %N - %T for normal albums. Use a Various Artists scheme too: %C\%C - %N - %A - %T - on CDs with Various Artists, check the Various box in the info at the top and make sure the track titles have a form Artist / Title, so, let's say, Madonna / What The Fuck Do You Think You're Doing :-). This way the names will all come out right. It also ensures that peer-to-peer programs which don't grok directories (most of them) will get the artist, album, and track number.
• Always write a log file. It'll be named after the album, that's the only drawback. Move it into the folder and use a script to rename it or something (I know of three competing ones but won't name them here).
• If you're feeling daring, calibrate your drive's read offset with AccurateRip (don't use that for ripping, though), and enter that offset into EAC (mine is a +12). If your drive can overread leadin AND leadout (get EAC to test that with detect read offset - you can get the read offset with that too, but it is more likely to give false readings than AccurateRip due to an inferior reference CD database), use that, if it can't overread BOTH, do NOT select that option (you'll get garbage). If you calibrate your read offset, use it, otherwise set it to 0. Don't use a combined offset.
• Encode to EITHER FLAC (for lossless, generation-copy free rips) OR Ogg Vorbis 20020717 (1.0) using quality 6.0 or greater (192kbps nominal), 8.0 highly

Re:Status of Ogg FLAC ?

[Hatta]

Ogg FLAC is apparently just a raw flac file imbedded in an Ogg package. Ogg123 will not play Ogg FLACs. I 3 FLAC and I 3 Ogg, but I dont know what extra functionality Ogg FLAC provides.