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Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support
An anonymous reader writes "While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."
Ogg Vorbis is:
o An invading species
o The best audio format
o Can be bought at Ikea
If you look at the price list for this chip it states that "Prices include MP3 license of Thomson Multimedia."
Wasn't the point of Ogg Vorbis to have a codec free of licensing?
Toys are a bit of a climb down from the vastly profitable market they were looking at. Still a few quid there though.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
OGG Vorbis is used all over the place in the Video Game Industry, since it's free, well documented, sounds great, and has source code available. I think MP3 is only in the forefront of people's minds because the news media coopted the name of that format to encompass all lossy compressed audio schemes, the way "Kleenex" is used by some people to refer to generic facial tissues.
That said, I've used Vorbis playback in an audio library I wrote, and thought it was probably the easiest part of the whole project.
Many voice mail systems only use 32kbps sampling and achieve fine results for that purpose, and the algorithms are easy enough to render on a 8-bit micro costing 50c.
When it comes to medium quality sound then there are basically two routes you can take: 8 bit micro (or even some dumb logic)running less fancy algorithms and a bit more flash/rom to store more verbose sound data; or more compressed sound and a flashier micro to run a heavier algorithm. You can now get 32-bit ARM micros for less than $1 making the second option reasonably feasible at low cost.
However flash is very cheap. NAND flash only costs approx 2c per MB (for multi-MB chips, so small chips are going to cost more per MB). You can fit a lot of "mama" phrases in a couple of MB. As a result you don't want to spend too much money on micros to save on flash.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ogg Vorbis is gaining popularity mostly because of the price per unit. When you make millions of dolls a year and you have to pay a $0.10 licensing fee per unit if it plays voice prompts in MP3 format, that starts to get pretty expensive. If WMA, AAC, MP3, or any other codec was cheaper and did not require significanly more flash memory to store, they'd be using that instead.
would you find a talking doll listed as the first application.
"And her name is
P-I-N-K-Y
P-I-N, no lie
K-Y, me-oh-my
She's $69.95
Give her a try"
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No DIP/PDIP version of the chip. So great if you're a consumer electronics giant who wants to maximize profits, not so hot if you want to build yourself a totally free player (as in, one can post the schematics in sf.net and anyone who can use an iron can build one). This is a triumph for big business, not open source.
Yes, I know about hacking reflow using a toaster oven, a meat thermostat and a stopwatch. It's not my idea of fun.
See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."
:)
Also see the page for a list of consumer products supporting the Ogg format.
This highlights the reasoning that large corporations such as IBM, Novell, and Sun have adopted open source methods: it lowers their bottom line. They pay programmers to work on open-source projects and they more than recoup the costs through savings in other areas such as interoperability. Open-source breeds open-standards and when basic infrastructure such as audio support is basically "free" then costs are lowered more by using common-infrastructure between manufacturers vs. constantly reinventing-the-wheel or developing your own library of common code/components. Reiterating simply, it's cheaper to pay programmers to develop free infrastructure code and give it away to reap higher profits from reduced costs in other areas such as interoperability.
Shh.
The "article" (actually the spec page) shows the device is much more that just a chip for toys. Otherwise, they would not have tone controls, stereo output, customizable firmware, "spacial processing", and most especially a FULL SPEED USB interface!
The unit looks like something that is much more useful as something like an iPod shuffle (since there is no display controller). And in reasonable quantity- the sucker only costs $4! Add a several more dollars of flash, battery, case, connectors, and buttons, and "ta da", you have a reasonable, cheap, portable audio stereo device.
It's rather ammusing (as we're emphasizing the 'zero license fee' for Ogg Vorbis) that when you go to the price list it actually states "Prices include MP3 license of Thomson Multimedia".
Wonder if you can actually by them without an MP3 license?
Simon.
"[They] exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates." That and there aren't any licensing fees to pay.
...with a dismissive "But does it play ogg?" Little tike was crushed.
Better check that list. Might owe the little fucker an apology.
The only reason I would make an embedded product using mp3 is if I had to be able to play random mp3s supplied by someone else. If I had control of the source audio, I would never use it. For a lot of applications Ogg even seems like overkill.
o n
If I wanted to go really cheap (making a product that only has a couple of sounds for instance) I might well select pulse width modulation. It needs no codec and you could even use a pic to play it back. As the parent points out all you need is a bit of cheap memory. The other advantage is that you don't need a linear amplifier; you can use class 'D'. That's a real advantage if you're using battery power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulati
Well, the problem is that you don't understand what "Ogg" and "Vorbis" (and "Theora") actually are. There's actually two different things here: codecs and container formats. "Ogg" refers to the container format; it's comparable to Quicktime, AVI, or Matroska. "Vorbis" and "Theora" refer to codecs (audio and video respectively); Vorbis is comparable to MPEG 1 layer 3 (aka MP3) or Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) and Theora is comparable to MPEG 2, DivX or H.264.
So, when people say "Ogg Vorbis" what they're actually referring to is a Vorbis audio stream inside an Ogg container. Presumably, it's possible to have a file with a raw Vorbis bitstream (without the Ogg container), and it's certainly possible to have an Ogg container without a Vorbis bitstream. This is also why Ogg Theora files have an .ogg extension; they're actually files with a Theora video stream and (probably) Vorbis audio stream, inside an Ogg container.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
To quote Vizzini, "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders..."
When speaking of USB (2.0), "Full-Speed" means 12 Mbit/s, while "Hi-Speed" means 480 Mbit/s.
A lot of dedicated "MPEG chips" used in portable audio and video players are capable of understanding both the MPEG container and the MP3 codec.
Quite well as far as I'm concerned; Speex is useful with Asterisk (a popular and extensible open source telephone system), I use it to make high-quality low-bandwidth encodings of talk shows I work with, and a lot of players play it (including VideoLAN Client which works on many operating systems). I never have to worry about patent hassles, proprietary software hassles, or losing control of my audio to digital restrictions management.
Digital Citizen
in section 3.2, footnote 3 (page 4), it mentions that the sample rate can be higher than 46.875 KHz. if you don't use usb (see footnote 2), it can decode up to 50.78125 KHz.
What moron modded that insightful?
Windows Media Player is a media player, ogg vorbis is an audio codec. You can play ogg files with WMP11 if you install the codec.
Not to be trite, but the very name of the format is a hindrance to adoption. The pronunciation is not immediately obvious, it's hard to spell correctly unless you stare at it for a while, and it doesn't seem to be related to audio, music, compression, or any other earthly topic.
Okay, sure they probably gave it a weird name on purpose, but maybe it's just time to not be weird any more.
I saw the chip, and contemplated using it in a project once. The problem with the VLSI Solution Oy chips is that they can only really be used in very well controlled embedded sound applications (doll saying "Hi"). They can't be used in a portable music player. Whereas most chips will continue to work after seeing bad data, the VLSI Solution Oy chips will crash hard. Toggling the reset pin won't even help, in some cases. You need to cut power, wait, and bring power back. I'm not kidding; this is a universal problem with their chips: http://www.vlsi.fi/vs1001/faq/faq.shtml#item9
I have no idea why they don't fix this bug -- it seems completely incompetent.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have been encoding my music CD collection in (DRM free)Ogg Vorbis for years. The audio quality is noticeably better than mp3 encoded at the same bitrate. When I give a demonstration to my friends they even say it (Ogg Vorbis) is better sounding than mp3 (most notably, the absence of compression artifacts, you know, that fluttery metallic sound in the high frequency content). It's nice to see a superior and free audio format actually making inroads to AAC, WMA and mp3.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I think it would be better if they where .music, .video extensions, straight to the point. End users just need to know that.
This is stupid, but until the iPod can play Ogg Vorbis, it'll never be truly mainstream. It'll stay a geek format forever.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
It's the PNG/GIF thing all over again.
Except in this case M$ gave music player makers a choice: our way or the highway. The Janus DRM license actually forbade the use of ogg. Though this was shot down by the EU, you might imagine the pressure is still there. Well, it was until M$ hosed every one of them over by dumping the former "Plays for Sure" for whatever their new "service" is. You would think they would revolt given they can't win in the M$ world.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
.avi and .mpg have the same problem. avi and mpeg are also the containers that can contain many different codecs; like XViD, DivX, raw DV, MPEG version 1, 2, and 4, motion JPEG and many others; some are somewhat compatible like XViD, DivX, and Mpeg4, some not. the containers have their own ways of allowing a player to know what codec is in the file so that it can be played.
.mp3 is an mpeg as well, they(0) just gave it a different extension so as to not confuse people. Why not do the same thing with ogg vorbis? Call it .og3, the masses might even think it's a new version of mp3 and take to it very quickly.
Hell,
(0) - you know, they, those people that do things.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
The Janus, "Plays for Sure" DRM license forbade OGG and that is a big reason there are not more players on the market. As newer players on the market show, the technical arguments given were pure bullshit and PR on M$'s part. They are fighting free software every dirty way they can.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It would be really nice if Adobe would support ogg in the next version of flash player. Currently the only audio codec supported is mp3, which helps to make flash a more closed platform.
Find free books.
Toys are a bit of a climb down from the vastly profitable market they were looking at.
Thanks to a small legal reversal Ogg may get in more than toys. We shall see if the total M$ industry screw the recent change in DRM scheme will bring OGG to the prominence it deserves.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not all audio players can handle video. Not all video players are any good for audio.
If the user clicks on something.ogg, should they get an audio player or a video player?
What kind of icon should the file get? Does it get an audio icon, or a video icon?
If the user does "file - open" in an audio app, should they see the *.ogg files? Some may be video, which makes them unsuitable choices.
Ogg Theora is stillborn of course, so this question is moot. The *.ogg files are audio.
AVI is a container format; you can have any number of codecs stored within an AVI file. Same thing for WAV.
Why is this a problem for Ogg but not AVI?
I was researching mp3 players, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Ogg listed as a format that the Stiletto can use.
Ogg Vorbis is a wonderful format with lots of nifty features. My little Samsung YP-U1 plays my oggs perfectly well, but my Pioneer car stereo won't.
Does anyone here remember back in 2001 when Ogg Vorbis proponents were touting Bitrate Peeling as a big must-have feature? Well it's 2007 and I'm still waiting to see a single workable implementation of it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
{Rant}
My company uses iPods for music on Hold for the phone systems we install. We used the iPod Shuffle until they changed the form factor to disallow their use for that purpose. (We have to have the power supply supplying power at the SAME TIME that the music is playing.)
We tried an MP3 player from Creative (the Sound Blaster people) and found it to be dismal and unworkable. It loaded Terabytes of ad-ware onto the PC and even changed the home page for the web browser. And even though the USB (power input) is separate from the audio out, they do not both work at the same time. So it's back to the iPod, seeking out old-style Shuffles until they run out, when we may have to switch to the Nano (more $$$).
What we would like is a memory stick-like device which just plays what we've loaded into it. No subscription; no sign-up; no software to load; no mucking (that an M) around with my settings or Registry. Maybe a text file config.ini which has things like Order=Random and Repeat=Yes. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, YES.
{/Rant}
parl
We're lucky that Ogg Theora was stillborn, because normal operating systems use file extensions to determine icons and players. If ".ogg" gets an audio icon (it does) and starts an audio player (it does), then it can not also get a video icon and start a video player.
If you really must have the low-quality Theora experience, you can use the ".avi" extension.
BTW, "Vorbis" does not exist. It got renamed. Languages evolve. In the English language, the codec found in *.ogg files is now called "ogg". Deal, OK?
Scan the files as you load them onto the device. Do something appropriate, such as:
a. When the user plays a bad file, substitute a file containing an error message.
b. Automatically delete the bad file.
c. Prevent selection of the bad file.
You apparently haven't actually tried "hacking reflow using a toaster oven". Solder paste is so incredibly easy (and time saving) that once you've tried it, you'll never go back. I use SMDs for all my homebrew projects for exactly this reason.
RMS also distributes in Ogg Vorbis http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html
--
Please mod this off topic too. We don't want people to know.
Ogg needs to be simpler name-wise. Right. And MP3 inspired the idea of "Compressed Music on My Computer" the first time you heard about it on IRC.
Give me a fucking break.
Advocacy and industry exposure is the only way to turn Vorbis from "zuh" into the next "google".
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
First off, AAC2 is not what you need. That's got goodies for channel seperatation that makes more sense for home theatre-type apps IIRC.
The benefit to Vorbis is that you've got the perceptual noise shaping thing going on (the other one that does that is Musepack), which AAC+ isn't using. Which means it has a shitty sounding failure mode when you shave those bps too closely. And the high-frequency re-synthesis, while a nice feature for bandlimited scenarios and things like ring-tones, isn't exactly a way to get a high-fidelity representation.
Your listening environment is going to have a lot to do with it. If the environment is already noisy, then AAC+ is going to be a good choice since it degrades high frequencies in a non-obvious way.
Otherwise, suck up a little extra space on the card and go with vorbis.
Also, between Vorbis and AAC+, Vorbis is more likely to have a playback app for your phone (AAC+ is a bit new for that yet)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It makes the original stream much larger, and peeled copies don't sound as good as the "real thing" encoded directly at the bitrate.
It's only useful if for some reason you have a broadcast system where you have a live source and need to trunk into multiple bitrate at some processing stage.
The situation is unlikely... most people would rather just run seperate streams since computing power is plentiful now.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
vor-bis, not verbose. and, i always reencode to higher titrates. :P
Ogg/Vorbis always sounded compressed and tinny, like FM radio. It's hard to believe there have been no quality improvements in the last 7 years. AAC has always provided the fullest, spacious sound.
"open the ones it understands while ignoring the rest"
I browse to the file in any of GNOME, Windows XP, Vista, KDE, or MacOS X. I click or double-click on the icon for that file, as is appropriate for my OS. The OS runs the app associated with ogg files. The app does not understand the file.
So you think the app should then IGNORE the file? Woah. I click and nothing happens. Sweet. That's a user experience all right!
The use of ogg for audio helps to make Ogg Theora unviable, because clicking on an ogg file will start an audio player.
The old way is still supported on Apple-specific filesystems, but Apple has learned to deal with the non-Apple world. Apple even ships MacOS X with many files being single-fork (data only) with file extensions, where formerly this was not done. An example is fonts, many of which now bear .otf extensions.
Windows shares, FAT-formatted media, and Joliet (Windows CD-ROM format) media are all common.
As for Linux, both magic and xattr are lame. They both cause extra disk seeks. At 5 ms per seek, a directory with 200 files will take an extra second to examine. With 2000 files, that's an extra 10 seconds. File magic is inaccurate and, worse yet, fundamentally unfixable by the user. The xattr feature is usually disabled, doesn't work on all filesystems (hello FAT), isn't even remotely portable, and suffers from xattr marks getting lost by unaware tools.
If you want to loop video, you put a closed GOP at the loop start point. So what do you do when you want to loop MPEG audio?
Then why didn't USB Implementers Forum standardize on something similar to the "X" notation popularized by CD-ROM, -R, and -RW? Here, "1X" is 1.5 Mbit/s, enough to transmit 150 KiB per second of mode 1 CD-ROM along with protocol overhead. This would make a "full speed" device up to 8X, while a "hi-speed" device goes up to 320X.
I fully understand both your posts -- they container/content difference, as well as the fact most consumers would --or should-- not care about those finer points (they just want their content).
But the GP has a point, and it's this: In a popular operating system, file types are identified solely on extension. So it's not even possible to tell a Vorbis file from a Theora file in the file manager, because they both show up as "Ogg media file".
In that light, it is perfectly understandable that people refer to "ogg-anything" as simply "Ogg". The problem is not, therefore, with the user, but with the software.
There are three ways around this:
-- in the short term, drop the files in VLC and see what happens (more accurately, "see vs. hear" what happens).
-- in the mid term, perhaps extensions should be renamed "ogv", "ogt", and "ogs" for Vorbis, Theora, and Speex respectively. But what then of Ogg files that contain FLAC, or MPEG, or whatever codec you can think of?
-- in the long term, the file manager needs a deeper understanding of file contents to determine file types, but this can in turn lead to vulnerabilities.
"Good news, everyone!"
A friend of mine bought a cheap portable AAA player from China. The brand was "X-Sound", IIRC. The manual said it plays only MP3 and WMA, but he tried to put an OGG there anyway and, surprise!, it worked! I searched the Xiph's hardware list, but it was not there.
factor 966971: 966971
You are commenting on VS1001, a chip that had its latest firmware upgrade in 2001, that is 6 years ago. Has it ever occurred to you that there could have been some development in the last half a decade and that JUST MAYBE the newer chips don't crash so easily on bad data? I find it disturbing that you wonder "why they don't fix this bug" and refer to a FAQ page of a chip that is at the end of its life cycle.
...that, now, because of your comment, some open-source geek (aoTuV ?) is bound to write a patch, just to proove the contrary ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...because then i'd convert *ALL* my music to Ogg format!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
> Ogg Vorbis
I can never remember, is this the species of aliens that destroyed the Earth in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or is it one of the Warriors Three in the Thor comic (RIP)?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Image you have a box that says on it "West Side Story", that's your file.
Open the box and inside might be a DVD of the film, CD of the soundtrack, tickets to the theatre or a book of the script.
If you don't have the CD Player "Codec", you can't play the CD.
yeah, real hard.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
My iAudio G3 flash based music player supports MP3, OGG, and (if I'm not mistaken) WMA. It works well with Linux, masquerading as a SCSI hard drive when I plug in its USB cable. I only use OGG and am quite pleased with it.
Ogg is free of needing to license patents. Unfortunately it won't prevent companies from being stupid enough to license patents that they don't need, though. It's also possible the chip does MP3 in addition to Ogg, in which case the licensing of the MP3 patent has nothing to do with Ogg being playable using the chip.
So, yes, usually when you buy Ogg hardware you are also usually paying for an MP3 license since most hardware Ogg players will also play MP3. The important part about Ogg is that we can distribute Free/OpenSource Software without being tied down by patents. Even if they want to, Free Software distributors can't pay for patent licenses since they have little idea about how many copies of the software have been made.
The worst thing for Ogg Vorbis right now would be a bunch of different file extensions it comes under. We've already picked ogg. Imagine if some people kept calling it ogg, some called it og3, and others picked a completely different extension. It would just confuse people. The extension doesn't matter too much as long as it is consistent.
> has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players
The first may be true, but selling music in a matrix of codecs and bitrates is going to be messy. The ultimate solution is to provide lossless copies (in a suitable patent-free codec), which can then be encoded into whatever codec and bitrate that will suit the user and devices.
Many portable players do play vorbis. Of course the highest profile ones don't, viz. the iPod because Apple want to push AAC, and the Zen because Creative wish to protect their alliance to Microsoft. Years ago, some smaller players lacked the necessary processing power and memory to handle vorbis in addition to mp3, but these players are long obsolete (dude, the ipod nano can run linux). My iRiver certainly plays vorbis, and wikipedia also lists Samsung, Rio, Neuros Technology and Cowon in addition.
If the iPod supported vorbis wouldn't the situation look *very* different?: So where can we lobby Apple? It's a shame so many users chose their devices on looks without considering whether they're restricted to iTunes, both as a music store and an interface.
This is stupid, but until the iPod can play Ogg Vorbis, it'll never be truly mainstream. It'll stay a geek format forever
The parent is insightful, not trolling. When one digital music player has 70-80% of the market, your digital music format has no chance in the market unless it plays on that device (AAC and MP3). Even if everything other than iPod started playing Ogg Vorbis, it still would have trouble mattering since we already have MP3 for universal playback. Until there's iPod support or until there's a serious iPod challenger that plays Ogg Vorbis, it will never be more popular than WMA which has the same issues.
I don't want to use a video player for audio files. The GUI is probably not optimal for audio.
Ignoring streams is still no good.
Ogg Vorbis is:
o An invading species
o The best audio format
o Can be bought at Ikea
o CowboyNeal