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

Re:Informal poll

[cepler]

An invading species of audio format sold by Ikea!

No wonder it's not used in many audio players!

Run away! Run away!!!! :-P

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

[MBCook]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Another advantage with ogg over mp3 is that it supports more than 2 channels. The video game industry, especially those doing dev on next-gen consoles, are quite aware of this.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[Dutch Gun]

Consoles have hardware-accelerated ADPCM compression for normal sfx, but audio streams can certainly be compressed with Vorbis. All the commercial audio libraries support it at this point, or else it's easy enough to add the support yourself. The next-gen engines have plenty of horsepower to spare for vorbis decoders - it's really not that expensive as long as you don't go too crazy with simultaneous decodes.

Our company is switching from mp3 to vorbis for our upcoming projects - it's definitely a better format for a closed system such as games. As is oft-mentioned here, it's a better-sounding codec at lower bitrates, which is important for MMOs, since occasional updates are expected - and saving bandwidth wherever possible certainly matters. And, it has a few technical benefits such as sample-accurate decoding (MP3 decodes in blocks, so you have to write additional kludges to get around this), which is helpful for loops.

It's nice to hear the format is picking up a bit of steam. I've had my eye on it for a long time, and have been impressed with the steady progress that has been made.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[CryoPenguin]

There's no problem with decoding MP3 in a fixed buffer size. Each frame contains exactly 1152 audio samples.

The MP3 problem you might be thinking of is the bit reservoir: Constant bitrate MP3 only pretends to be constant bitrate. If you look at the spacing between MP3 frame headers it looks like each frame is exactly the same size. But they're really not: frames can borrow bits from nearby frames, so the compressed data at one place in the stream doesn't necessarily decode to the decompressed samples that nominally correspond with that frame. Thus it's tricky to determine where you have to start decoding if you want to seek to a given sample number, and the naive seeking method could be off by about +/- 0.25 seconds.

That problem is specific to MP3; I don't know of any other audio format that suffers from it. All Vorbis had to do to fix it was be logical and put each bit in the frame it's supposed to be in, not in some random other frame.

Re:money talks

[Technician]

It is no longer a dime anymore. The IC prices are not listed online, but the per device prices are for hardware items.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/hardware.html

At the bottom of the page is tha item that unless you buy chips with the license, the minimum for doing it yourself is $15,000 USD. If you are making a limited quanity of an item, the minimum can be a showstopper unless you buy chips from someone else, which may also be a little expensive. Dropping MP3 can save a chunk of change since a free alternative exists.

It's the PNG/GIF thing all over again.

Branding: "Ogg" vs. "Vorbis"

[mrchaotica]

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.

Re:Informal poll

[gbobeck]

The noob looked like Scorpion with the ninja garb, but completely black.

Actually, he looked more like Sub-Zero with the completely black ninja garb.