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."

Comments

Downloading Garbage

[bigwavejas]

Percentage figures like these are going to spell doom for torrents. They're going to do nothing but light a big fire under the MPAA and RIAA's asses (Not like they needed it). Expect more fake/ spoofed files masquerading as legitimate movies/ music. People should start thinking about using some bolt-on software for their EDonkey (or ??), much like http://donkeyfakes.gambri.net/ ,or they're going to be downloading a lot of Garbage (and not the Shirley Manson type either).

Re:Downloading Garbage

[mrchaotica]

Why do you automatically assume it's copyright-infringed music? Moreover, why do you assume it belongs to the RIAA or MPAA? Considering that it's "mostly in Asia" it could very well be legally-copied (or infringed from organizations other than the RIAA) Asian music.

Re:Downloading Garbage

[ZephyrXero]

Actually many smaller/independent artists release all, or a large portion of their music for free on their websites...usually at a lower quality of compression, but free none the less... It's a great way to let people hear your music if you don't have the thousand$ to pay for play on the radio ;)

Re:Downloading Garbage

[Doc Ruby]

The Grateful Dead

And hundreds of other bands in Archive.org

Re:Downloading Garbage

[aevan]

Off hand, i'd say a lot? Ayu, Hikki, all the idol singers, etc have a large circulation. Not to mention cpop and kpop like BoA with followings all over.

For example, a survey in thailand gave thai teens to prefer local as opposed to foreign (i.e. western) at 90%+. Just check the content on the MTV Thailand for a large quantity of their local music.

Most of my friends are asian in asia, and prefer their own music as opposed to north american derived.

I'd recommend giving your own head a shake and stop living in a north american/euro-centric dreamland. The entire world doesn't automatically desire NA goods by virtue of their being from NA, and forsake their own. For example, check out oricon for listings of what is popular in Japan-you will see some western but a lot of local music as well (predominantly usually).

I'll grant western music is heavily pirated, but so too is their local; you pirate what you want to hear, and if local music is preferenced...

Re:Downloading Garbage

[Kris_J]

Probably because I can't think of any artist that likes to give away his/her music for free.

I take it that in your world, MP3.com never happened.

Re:Downloading Garbage

[minus9]

Home taping is killing music!!!

Go Ogg!

[Anonymous Coward]

Better compression, better sound, better freedom. 'Nuf said.

Wow

[okayplayer]

Open source music on open source protocols... Who would have thunk?

Traffic statistics

[Paska]

> 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.

Is this really a huge shock? After all your average movie is (let's just say) 500 megabyte, with your average song at around 2 megabyte - of course video traffic is going to outweigh audio downloads by a great amount.

OGG

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with Mp3 and WMA?

Re:OGG

[hungrygrue]

Both are closed formats. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to play wma files under Linux/BSD is to use Microsoft's DLL files which is illegal (Though if you have a legal copy of Windows I suppose that is a grey area. I and many other Linux users, however, do not own or use Windows). MP3 support requires a license fee http://mp3licensing.com/ OGG is an open standard with no strings or restrictions.

Re:OGG

[tepples]

as I understand it [the LAME programmers] haven't paid a penny to the creators of MP3

...yet.

Slightly OT

[jtwJGuevara]

The linux community at large seems to have a strong sentiment in favor of using ogg over mp3. I personally tried ogg but in my media player of choice (xmms) the equalizer had absolutely no effect on ogg files whereas with mp3 files the equalizer worked, thus making the mp3 sound much, much better than the non-equalized (don't know the technical name for it) sound of the ogg file. Does anyone know why this is? Am I missing a good thing by not using ogg or is ogg just hyped up a bit much?

Re:Slightly OT

[vonstauf]

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.

Re:Slightly OT

[k8to]

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.

Re:Slightly OT

[Phat_Tony]

"The linux community at large seems to have a strong sentiment in favor of using ogg over mp3"

I can give you one reason it's not as big on the Mac as it is on Linux- support. The Macintosh OS-plugin for Ogg never made it out of Beta, hasn't been updated in 15 months, and doesn't work with Quicktime 7- which includes pretty much everyone who's updated to Tiger or run software update under Panther. I mean no offense, I'm glad that people volunteer their time to make things like Ogg for free, but to be practical- I don't pay anything to rip to MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless, and right now all my Ogg files won't play for who knows how long. It makes the format a pretty risky choice for Mac users.

Yes, I know that there are other applications that play Ogg files on the Mac, but they're not competitive with iTunes, and I'm not going to change players depending on what music file I want to listen to.

Nice misleading title

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Nice misleading title

[leoxx]

Yeah, not many people download movies in OGG format, and the ones that do probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the sound works perfectly but the picture is so garbled.

Re:Nice misleading title

[joebutton]

> Yeah, not many people download movies in OGG
> format, and the ones that do probably spend a lot
> of time trying to figure out why the sound works
> perfectly but the picture is so garbled.

Actually ogg is a container format which can contain both sound and video. Vorbis is the audio format.

Great news

[darthgnu]

I only hope this percentage has an actual meaning... On the plus side, it will be a pleasure to download those CD's that have "rip" ""protection" in ogg. I proudly buy my music, but I cannot stand _any_ DRM, I rip all my CD's in ogg, and get them on my neuros music player. Great quality, smaller file size, I love it.

Hmm, that's interesting...

[DarkYoshi]

61.44% of the peer-to-peer traffic nowadays is video

I wonder what percentage of that is video minors are allowed to see?

Ogg Vorbis faces a challenge of intertia

[chrysrobyn]

I tried out several encoders in 2001 when considering compressing my music library. I tried double blind tests on the best realistic equipment I'd be using (then a 10 year old amp and pretty new Bose 501 speakers -- both are now clearly 4 years older) using my PC sound card's RCA outputs. Not an audiophile setup by any means, but certainly a bit better than the PC's internal speaker.

In my tests, Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps, MP3 (LAME) at 256KBps and something else.. WMA? at 256KBps were not decipherable from the original CD to my ears. Interestingly enough, I favored Ogg Vorbis even more because when I backed it down to 128KBps the artifacs I could hear sounded better than MP3's at 168. My choice was made -- Ogg Vorbis at 192KBps would be my preferred codec.

So I went around looking for what could play it. Only a few pieces of software (winamp and xmms were the two I cared about) and zero hardware. I had aspirations of taking music with me, so that left all but MP3 out of the game at the time.

I currently use iTunes to store and organize my library of 400+ CDs and synchronize a subset to my 1st generation 5GB iPod. Now that I've put that much effort into a single program, either another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable, or iTunes will have to support Ogg Vorbis for me to encode future CDs in a codec other than MP3. Once iTunes encodes and plays Ogg Vorbis files, then I'll see about an iPod or similar that will play them (these days I'm in the iPod Shuffle price range). Since iTunes is a free (as in beer.. but where's all this free beer people talk about?) encoder, I'm not willing to pay for the inconvenience of switching to a new program.

Amazing where your media goes

[Realistic_Dragon]

My brother took a copy of his Black Adder DVDs back with him to China in Xvid+Vorbis format (to save damaging the originals).

6 months later I buy a pirate copy in Mexico to show to a friend because I don't have *my* originals with me, and it was the same files (or at least, the same checksum when I checked with him). Also on the disk was a vorbis codec and instructions about how to install it... and how to rip new media with it to best effect.

Something to think about.

Re:the apple cock tastes fine

[PunkOfLinux]

Just because a player plays the 'standard' formats does not make it superior. Look at iPodLinux... it has an ogg player. The only reason most standalone mp3 players don't have ogg support is because the developers wrongly think that it's a completely marginal format, which is becoming increasingly untrue.

If ONE developer would include ogg support, then it would become even more popular and accepted.

And the only reason most people still use mp3 is because, unlike mp3 (which is proprietary), ogg is open-source. Microsoft seems to go out of their way to exclude open-source.

Re:Great

[stuuf]

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?

Re:Portable music players

[isolationism]

Plenty of the iRiver and Samsung offerings support it. My 1GB samsung YP-T6 is (slightly) smaller than a Shuffle, has a screen and more than 2 play modes, an FM tuner, a mic and line in with direct encoding capability (128kbps, but good enough for dictating notes etc.) and plays MP3, WMA, and OGG just fine. It also connects to Windows and Linux as a regular mass-storage device and so doesn't require iTunes or any of its open-source alternatives.

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.