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."

Comments

MP3 License

[Agent_Eight]

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?

Re:MP3 License

[mrchaotica]

I was wondering about that. I've never used it.

Unless I'm mistaken, just about everything (e.g. Windows Media Audio, AAC, Vorbis) is better than MP3. What's debatable is how the former three compare to each other.

Perhaps Ogg for all internal sounds to a device, and the MP3 capability for sounds the user wants to add so they don't have to use a "weird custom proprietary" format (despite the the fact it's not).

That makes sense, since even if the user has heard of Vorbis he doesn't necessarily want to re-encode (and certainly doesn't want to transcode, as the resulting file would sound worse because the previous encoding to MP3 would have thrown away information that Vorbis would need).

Re:MP3 License

[k8to]

It all depends upon the bitrates and the application. Also mp3 is not as static a target as you might think, with the advancements in lame over time.

If you believe the folks on hydrogen audio, when strong music fidelity is a concern, WMA has unpleasant artifacts at most bitrates, save the very high where even still mp3 is probably your best bet for transparent lossy compression. Well, maybe wavepack if you're really hardcore, but mp3 seems "good enough" for most ears, while wma does not.

At lower bitrates (128kbs down to 40kbps or so) mp3 isn't as competitive, and the winners at different bitrates seem to be AAC and Vorbis AoTuV. This is really impressive for Vorbis because it is a _much_ simpler format, without various special tweaks and features to help out at certain format ranges. The specialized features of AAC help it hit certain windows, but also cost overall in format complexity, which has a minor effect on size overall, and a major effect on implementability. Vorbis by contrast is much simpler and therefore re-implementable, although market forces have not pushed as hard for tuned implementations.

Once you start heading south of 40kbps, you probably aren't really so interested in music anymore, and other more focused audio codecs, probably for speech, are what you'll want to look at.

But the point is mp3 still has some application domains (~200-300kbps, full spectrum music) where it is probably the best format in terms of fidelity and certainly implementatability, primarily because of the maturity of the encoder sourcebase. Surprising, but true.

Personally, for portable music replay, I use Vorbis AoTuV at around 160kbps, because while in testing on my portable player I could often tell the difference, the differences were never offensive. It's possible that some form of aac encoder could achieve this as well for me, but FAAC could not, and I am not willing to pirate and run windows or mac binaries just to encode music in formats that aren't broadly supported anyway on current devices (especially mine). WMA had an unpalatable flat quality at all rates I tested. Maybe it's improved but I was really testing for novelty. That format is even worse than AAC, which at least has an open specification.

OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[StaticEngine]

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.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[acidrain]

I mentioned ogg to the lead sound programmer at the last games company I worked at and they started using it at their generic format. It still had to be converted to a console specific format for the runtime, because the hardware was designed to handle certain types of streams, and audio isn't cheap to transform cpu-wise. Of course that was ps2/xbox/gc and I'm under the impression that they were able to do a lot more runtime processing of the audio on the "next gen" consoles, but I don't know what role ogg played. Certainly the memory bandwidth savings off ogg in the runtime may outweigh the cpu costs, but again, that's probably something most companies are still working out and I don't know from experience.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[ewhac]

Also, Ogg Vorbis is much more predictable.

Apparently, you can't take apart an MP3 in a deterministic way. That is, if you hand a compressed block to the MP3 decoder, you could get back an uncompressed block of any size, and it's not possible to determine this size ahead of time. You can partially decode blocks ("Decompress in to this buffer up to a maximum of N bytes,"), but then you can't restart the decoder from exactly where you left off. This means you have to either re-decode the entire block and throw away what you've already used, or blindly move on to the next block and hope no one notices the pop. This sort of sloppiness is generally frowned upon in game programming circles.

Vorbis apparently doesn't suffer from these shortcomings. And it sounds better.

This imparted to me by an experienced console game programmer, as relayed through my highly imperfect memory.

Schwab

No, Worse because M$ Squished it.

[twitter]

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.