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Ogg Vorbis Share Reaches 12.3% on P2P Traffic
prostoalex writes "According to CacheLogic survey, 61.44% of the peer-to-peer traffic nowadays is video, with audio taking distant second place, representing 11.34% of global traffic. Moreover, 12.3% of all the music files traded on P2P networks are in Ogg format. Almost all of the OGG files are traded via BitTorrent protocol with most of the growth coming from Asia, CacheLogic says."
12.3% of MUSIC transfers, which is 11.34% of all traffic -- so Ogg makes up 1.4% of all P2P traffic. Which ain't bad at all, but is nowhere near 12.3
Not being at my desktop because I'm fair away in cube land, I can atleast attest that my XMMS player that came stock with Slackware seems to do just fine with the equalizer and ogg files. I'll test it out when I get back to the bat cave. This bug seems to be what you're dealing with. Here are some comments about it.
" Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish that man would go away."
You know, the article only mentioned the "Ogg [contianer] file format," and the submitter had no reason to insert "vorbis," so some of it might be Ogg/FLAC. Could even be theora video, which would make the assertion that 12% of the "audio" traffic is ogg... we've long ago collectively learned that AVI is a container not a compression scheme, so can we start using the right terminology for Ogg now?
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Despite your claims to the contrary, bitrates below 256kb/s are still regularly used. Perhaps not by you, or your friends, but they are used for a variety of applications, including portable replay, network streaming, and so on.
For most listeners, the quality achieved by 256kb/s mp3 can be achieved at around 192kb/s with quality encoders such as LAME. That is, at this bitrate, the decoded material is indistinguishable from the original source by most (the majority of) listeners. This has been confirmed by a number of independent blind tests. Note that this is not universal for all listeners nor all source material, but it is generally found to be true. For these reasons, some people place their trust in psychoacoustic models to automatically choose a rate, or they add a "headroom" and pick a value like 256, as you state.
Comparably, ogg vorbis tends to achieve general transparency at around 160kb/s as compared to mp3. Again this is of course not for all listeners and all source material, but for the significant majority. I personally encode my music at -q 6 which tends to result in files of around 150 to 180 kbps, the encoder decides what is necessary from moment to moment.
Of course, modern AAC (and I say modern because the AAC format has been extended over time) seems to be able to achieve transparency at even lower bitrates, but less extensive tests have been done, so a precise number is hard to quote. However, Ogg/Vorbis has another significant benefit, in that it does not contain, or claims not to contain, any patented algorithms or technology, which is of real benefit to a variety of players including companies who wish to provide content in lossy formats, and companies who wish to provide players of lossy formats. Generally, individual do not see direct benefits of these issues, but avoiding of patent licenses should ultimate lower fees and increase competition among providers of both devices and content, and thus will result in greater choice and lower costs to end users, which should be of benefit to them.
Thus, in essence, ogg sits in a middling position in absolute quality, but holds a promise of improving the overall marketplace for all players, and using and supporting the format may bring about long range benefits to yourself.
-josh
It's a pity OGG support isn't more wide-spread, and worse still that lots of people bitch about wanting mp3s, completely oblivious to the closed-source brick wall the "next generation" of mp3 formats is going to present. I naturally will be smug with my OGG-playing YP-T6 and EPIA running Linux/Freevo as a set-top multimedia player.