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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 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.
I think this is the whole reason. If someone is looking for a chip that does Ogg, they can choose this one. If they are looking for a chip that does MP3, they can choose this one.
Business wise, which is better? Selling an MP3 decoder chip for $0.10 each (just a guess), or selling an MP3/Ogg decoder chip for $0.10 each? Since there are no patents, adding Ogg support is free, but adds value. Lots of people may want chips that can play MP3s (GPS, Cell Phones, MP3 players, calculators, EVERYTHING plays MP3s), but how many would buy a chip that only did Ogg? I doubt that market is nearly as large. Added value.
That's my guess. Your product (possibly with a little bit of extra programming) could even use both. MP3 for things you want at a higher quality, Ogg for things less important. Maybe you are upgrading your old product. You can keep all the old samples MP3 and just add the new samples as Ogg. Who knows.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The real issue is that people use extensions based on the container format, which is totally irrelevant to anything. Why would you ever care that your file uses the Ogg container, but not care what codec it uses or even what sort of media is encoded in it? I give all of my Ogg Vorbis files the extension ".audio", same as my mp3 files. Any software that's likely to be able to play them is going to be able to tell from the file contents what container format it uses. But it's useful to me to know whether I should be playing a file with a music player or a video player.
Of course, I think most people would be more comfortable giving their Ogg Vorbis files the extension ".mp3", since that's commonly and unambiguously used for files containing only 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?