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Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary"
a nona maus writes "Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to."
They don't like open standards.
Ogg Vorbis/Theora is completely free and easily documantable so, since that was one of its primary design goals. I hope these people get kicked were it hurts and stay down afterwards.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
From vorbis.com:
"Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
I lost any respect for Nokia.
Ogg technologies, based almost exclusively on the current perception of them being
free. The current perception ? WTF ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
In other news Microsoft is making claim that odt is proprietary.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
If you look at the link to the position paper, you'll see this was something Nokia published back in _August_.
Apple doesn't support Ogg, which as a Mac user bums me. It shouldn't be hard to add support.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Its seems Nokia wants to support Apples codecs, rather than Ogg or MP3 (although MP3 is mentioned as a possible) I found the paper interesting as they talk about majorally accepted file formats they state their after ACC, I always thought ACC was about as popular as Ogg with MP3 the generally accepted and mainstream codec.
Personnally I'd rather see divx and mp3 be used as the next standards, but Xvid and Ogg would be cool.
What crack are these people smoking? And if I were to get hired to Nokia, would I get some as part of the benefit package (or is it only reserved for position paper writers)?
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Theft is 9/10 of the law. The law is all theft.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This document was written by Stephan Wanger who, according to his bio "serves on the Board of Directors of UB Video Inc., a leading supplier of video compression software".
I wonder if this has anything to do with him not particularly liking ogg?
To whomever was lucky enough to have his tag randomly selected...
Way to misspell "complete..."
I really wish Apple would start building in Ogg-vorbis support. It's a common format these days, and there really isn't a reason not to support it (that I can think of).
"a W3C-lead standardization of a "free" codec, or the ..., by W3C, is, in our
active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg,
opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and
therefore not our choice."
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
This document has a number of grammatical errors and parts that seem unclear, so I am wondering whether it has just been translated badly? I can imagine that it was originally written by an engineer in Finnish or Swedish then translated by someone rather further down the food chain.
Or the guy is just a nut and has no idea of what he is talking about, you pay your money, you make your choice!
My little Linux and tech blog
I had a scan through the PDF document, and couldn't really believe what I was reading. They're yet another company being pussy-whipped by Hollywood and the whole DRM issue (and it has now been demonstrably proven that widespread DRM can never work), rather than looking at the realities of the technology and working out how to make money from it. This is a very bizarre section to read: Commercial Constraints of the Web and Video ecosystems: Nokia doesn't seem to understand that the W3C is not in the habit of recommending technologies as web standards that are patented and proprietary and that mean that implementation is restricted.
Digital video over the web has been severely hindered, because it is not as widespread as content available through HTML.
No other W3C standard takes into account DRM. Nokia seems to misunderstand the role of the W3C.
Non-professional sources?
I think that should confirm that this document is junk, and that Nokia doesn't have the faintest idea what it is talking about.
This is just downright bizarre.
At first, I wasn't not so sure that Nokia was concerned about keeping Hollywood happy, as they are about keeping the current status quo of proprietary video and audio codecs, additionally restricted by patents if required. However, I haven't got the foggiest what Nokia are arguing. They just seem to be squirming over Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora for some reason.
I suspect Nokia and others balk at the inclusion of Ogg and other GPL standards because it would force them to give away their work if they want to support it.
The post focuses on a single detail: the author calls Ogg a "proprietary format". This is of course a regrettable and stupid comment as Ogg, Theora and Vorbis are not proprietary in any sense. But I suggest reading the whole paper which is an interesting and valid point of view. They are AGAINST the decision of the W3C to recommend those format for Web video. They use three arguments:
1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks.
The last one is partially valid also but I have to add a comment: First, Nokia has vested interest in codec developments itself (they have patents related to the AMR codec). Second one has to remind that they are phone manufacturers. It is clear that they are more at ease with the standard process developed by the ITU. And I understand them: they are not building software but they are embedding chips with hardware codec capabilities. If someone 'forks' the standard and the OSS community decides to create an alternative standard (see Torrent protocol), all the chips that they developped are toasted.
Emmanuel
At least they're honest, I suppose.
Athy, athier, athiest.
For a position paper issued by a major company, that was awfully rough. I found several spelling mistakes ("anoher" for "another") for example. Apparently Nokia can't be bothered to run a spell checker on documents like this one. And call me crazy, but usually you don't use smiley faces like :-) in a position paper (as he does on page four). Then we have sentences like this one, which is the bit about Ogg being proprietary:
Holy comma splice, Batman! And isn't it redundant to talk about a "W3C-lead standardization ... by W3C"? But te worst thing here is the totally unclear use of "proprietary." At other places in the document, the author recommends selecting "older media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that related
patents are expired (or are close to expiration)." Which seems odd. Isn't the whole attraction of Ogg Theora that it isn't patented at all? Why recommend an older standard that IS patented over a newer one that isn't? And how exactly does that come under the label "proprietary" anyway?
As a position paper, then, it could be better. It does in fact give their position. But it does so in a way which is unclear, and its author doesn't seem to think that writing a position paper is different from writing a comment on a web forum.
They're currently selling one of their models with the advertising line "Takes all music formats", when in fact it doesn't do Ogg Vorbis, nor FLAC nor any of the many other formats in wide use.
It is just a word document converted to PDF. Forget what one random guy says look at what they do. They have made three revisions of their Linux Internet tablets and in the process put a rocket under GNOME Mobile libraries, that is quite a commitment to open source software.
Now I am hoping that Maemo will be a first step towards replacing that monstrosity that is Symbian with Linux.
My little Linux and tech blog
As anyone knows, Ogg/Theora+Vorbis is an open format. There is clearly nothing proprietory about it and whoever write that NOKIA paper is obviously utterly confused about what constitutes an open format and the legal framework of IP. I recommend NOKIA to immediately fire that person and issue a clarification with the proper definition of the open Ogg/Theora+Vorbis format in order to save their face and the reputation of the company.
I can't believe this is a legitimate Nokia position paper. The document is full of typos and misinformation. Not only does it claim that ogg is proprietary, it suggests that MPEG2 or Flash would be more acceptable to Nokia. I hope someone from Nokia publishes a correction otherwise they'll lose some respect in open source communities and within the w3c.
Nokia calls OGG proprietary and talks about a "percption of OGG being free" (slightly paraphrased by me to fit this sentence), but completely fails to address how a codec that is released under GPL can be proprietary.
;-)
I also noted that they drop terms like "proprietary" in passing rather that making them a bullet point. Reads like an attempt to get them past the readers attention
C - the footgun of programming languages
While these codecs that are proposed are FREE, they are not widely supported.
Firstly, Nokia wants complete ecosystem, where content of the future is available on the web now.
We have YouTube. Do you really think they are going to convert their whole digital library to Ogg just because some company proposed it as their next standard. No. Nokia just wants to leverage the power W3C has to make it promote the file formats it already supports.
AAC is used in iTunes library. Nothing more is needed.
If these formats become accepted, devices can support the technology NOW, and be ready for the future, where more content is coming in these formats.
Secondly, I think Nokia has licensed all this stuff from Apple and other organizations, so they don't have to
a) Buy new licenses
b) Write new software
c) Use any code that can cause potential licensing problems (GPL is a no-no, if you run a propietary solution)
The other options (some really old stuff, where patents have expired) , kinda succested this. Nobody is going to fill the web with stuff done with codecs older than themselves. MP3 being the only exceptio, but if I read correctly, that won't be available free until 2011.
Sounds like theft of a standard always intended to be open. And Nokia comes off sounding like a bully who feels they're so big that they will get away with it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
- No-one knows if Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora are encumbered by patents. They were developed to be free of the main known patents, but they could still be encumbered by some submarine patent. If they're accepted as the baseline, Nokia face unknown risk if such a patent emerges after they've deployed the technology in hundreds of millions of phones. With H.261/AAC, the risks are more known because an unknown patent-holder would have sued someone by now.
- There's a lot of content available online (though not directly as part of Web standards). Nokia in concerned that the content producers will will stear clear of Ogg in favour of solutions that support DRM or at least have a known track record. Better the devil you know...
The second concern is probably rubbish, in so far as they are asking for H.264/AAC instead. DRM on these is completely orthogonal to the issue of the codec - you could easily wrap Theora in a DRM wrapper if you wanted (though why you'd want to is beyond me).The first concern though is more interesting. Basically Nokia seems to be saying that they'd rather pay predictable patent licensing fees for H.264/AAC than face unknown risk. That's a business decision, and I don't know of any good argument against it - we really don't know if there are any submarine patents that Theora or Vorbis might infringe on. From what I know about coding, it seems unlikely (especially in the case of Vorbis), but not impossible to me.
Despite this, I think W3C made the right call and should stick to it.
We already know what they're up to. The only real question is, will they get away with it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Ogg Theora is a product of a single company. It has not been standardized by any recognized standards organisation. That indeed makes it "proprietary".
The company, On2 Technologies, has disclaimed all patent right on the technology. However, as far as I know they are not a significant holder of video compression patents. I don't think any actual big video patent holders has commented about Theora. This means that there is a significant risk of submarine patents.
According to the paper Theora is comparable in performance to the old H.261 codec. H.261 is about 20 years old so all patents on it have most likely expired. H.261 is widely implemented and if the performance claims are true, it makes Theora rather pointless.
Since the article is about *video*, not audio, let me ask a question. Isn't the constant bit rate feature of MP3 important for video, so that keeping audio in sync with video frames is easier? Ogg may have better quality for a given bucket of bits, but it is not a constant bit rate, making synchronization with video more complex. Of course, with the advent of Youtube, no one expects video and audio to be in sync anyway ...
Reminds me of the time I was talking to the CTO of a large, now-defunct book store
chain. I was selling migration of applications to UNIX.
The CTO told me that Windows-NT was more open than UNIX. The phone did not
adequately communicate my jaw dropping.
Vorbis is lisenced in the public domain http://www.vorbis.com/faq/#flic. Nokia could just staple on whatever DRM they want and wouldn't have to share it with anyone. Granted, it would mean they'd have a format that no phone but theirs would be able to play, but on the other hand, when has that ever stopped anyone?
Nokia went into my shitcan when they supported EU software patents. The senior management at Nokia appear to be clueless and unable to restrain employees who are solely acting in personal self interest. First their in-house council pushing for patents and now some jerk who also sits on the board of a company involved with propriety codecs.
Vorbis and theora are currently the only contenders for standardizing online video. If this cunt doesn't like it, why doesn't he quit bitching and release better patent-unencumbered, open source code that we can look at? That goes for Microsoft, Apple and the other players too!
Hear that? Shut the fuck up or show us the code!
Maybe I'm missing the entire point here, but why the heck does the next version of html 5 even need to define a standard format for video? Are they also going to recommend what browser I should use, what operating system I should run, or what brand of coffee I should drink? I mean, seriously, I don't see what this even has to do with html.
Ogg is not "equal or superior to most other codecs" because it's not a codec. It's a container file that holds content compressed using a codec.
Ogg is comparable with Apple's QuickTime container format (MOV), Microsoft's former AVI (based on IFF), Microsoft's newer ASF, the rival FOSS Matroska container, or the ISO's MPEG-4 container (MP4, based on QuickTime).
When you talk about Ogg being a "good codec," it demonstrates the kind of impractical, blind bias for free-sounding buzzword projects, which FOSS advocates are quick favor over real open standards that are accepted and established. Ogg isn't open vs closed MPEG-4; they're both open containers available for non-discriminatory licensing. The difference is that there are only some theoretical uses of Ogg and a single source of documentation and libraries for it, while MPEG-4 is in use everywhere, has support across the industry, and has wide hardware support in silicon, because the MPEG-4 container is paired with a portfolio of codecs that people actually use. Ogg also competes with other FOSS containers such as Matroska, so it's not the lone FOSS messiah at all.
Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations).
After realizing there was no reason to fight MPEG-4 with a proprietary runner up, On2 donated Theora to Xiph to use with Ogg, and Xiph published it as an open specification. However, Microsoft basically did the same thing: it published WMV with the SMPTE group as an "open standard" called VC1.
If you think Microsoft's VC1--which it's using to compete against the open MPEG-4--is an "open standard," then you can also say Theora is. It's easier to describe both as failed proprietary technologies that nobody uses, although Microsoft is pushing VC1 hard in HD-DVD and in Windows Vista.
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd. It means that rather than having one set of codecs that the world contributes toward, we'll have an official joke that nobody uses decreed the "standard" while everyone actually uses MPEG-4 / H.264 (and probably H.265 by the time HTML5 arrives).
This is not a case of OpenDocument vs MS-XML, open vs closed. It's closer to a case of GPL v3 vs BSD/Apache: rhetoric vs reality. Trying to rip apart MPEG-4 and install an openly published version of a failed proprietary standard that nobody uses in its place will only hand the lead to Microsoft's VC-1 (which itself is a proprietary version of H.263). What would that accomplish?
Supporters for Ogg/Theora are voting for a Ross Perot, assuring that we'll really get a George Bush. What we really need is an Al Gore: centrist, workable, functional, capable, and proven to work.
If that analogy lost you: pushing Ogg/Theora might make you proud to have voted, but it will only distract from the industry's coalition to unitedly back H.264 from mobile devices to HD. There's far more FOSS support for MPEG-4 and H.264 than for Ogg/Theora and the rest of the outdated codecs Xiph has salvaged from the dumpster of proprietary efforts. Having wide support behind one good, open portfolio of standards will make it easier for FOSS to compete with and participate in the desktop computing world.
Why Low Def is the New HD
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War
ITU & ISO MPEG-4 codecs and container
What Apple is trying to say is that they cannot be sure that Ogg codecs are patent-free. Yes, Ogg has documented and freely licensed known patents. The problem is that it means nothing. Troll-friendly US patent system allows submarine patents, which might apply to Ogg, and you can't be sure until technology is older than life of patent or someone gets sued (and trolls might stay put until lawsuit-worthy company starts using the technology).
(Yes, this sucks, sounds stupid and applies to everything. Congrats to USPTO).
I know this will be somewhat redundant, but just read the FAQ on Vorbis' website. It explains everything that Nokia needed to know before writing this travesty.
http://www.vorbis.com/faq/#fan
Have a few too many glasses of egg n-ogg and getting greedy!
Two technologies, A and B. A was created 20 years ago and was patented but is largely open for use now. B was created 5 years ago and its makers benevolently made it without patents.
Along comes Evil Company. They declare that tech B uses their patented technology X. Sure, B itself doesn't have any patents. But they snuck a broadly worded patent claim in ten years ago and revised it endlessly to the point where an underlying part of B is affected.
Now, B, unpatented as it may be, has hardware manufacturers having to pay huge licensing fees to Evil Company to use the supposedly free technology B.
Technology A, on the other hand, is tweny years old. That puts it before most of the crazy modern patent issues. Plus, having been around for twenty years, it's a known quantity - more or less any patents that might come up already have come up. Finally, even if one does come up, it has to be older than the tech - giving it at the very most - 5 years before it expires.
Thus, to a hardware manufacturer like Nokia, something that's not totally free but is also pretty safe from suddenly becoming very expensive to support is far better than something that's totally free but has a much larger risk associated.
So, the problem isn't as simple as Ogg is free, MP3 isn't completely. It's MP3 is a known quantity, Ogg seems free right now but may saddle us with insane licensing fees because of the broken patent system.
This is exactly what happened to digital camera makers. They adopted JPEG, thinking there was little to no cost associated. As soon as it became the absolute standard, along comes a third party and claims they've got a patent on an underlying tech. Suddenly everyone's forking out millions for what was supposed to be a cheap solution. Strangely enough, they don't want to do that again. They'd rather a worse tech and a small fee over a better, free tech and the risk of having to pay massive fees once they can't back out.
Although the position paper mistakes Ogg as being proprietary, I don't see what's so great about the format. Last time I checked no one actually uses Ogg, and I'd take that as a good indication that it isn't heads above the competing standards. I mean, if I didn't read slashdot I'd never have known that Ogg exists.
mpeg4, AAC, and h.264 are already pretty well supported, so I have to ask why anyone would look at a technology that has pretty much been ignored by the industry.
Also, lack of DRM support would make Ogg unusable for many people. You can argue all you want that companies shouldn't use DRM, and I would argue the same thing, but if that's one of their requirements, lack of it dooms practical adoption of the standard. If they start putting things in HTML 5 that no one is going to use, then they are only hurting adoption of HTML 5.
I hope you lose your job over this you idiot.
This has been an on going joke between some Nokia N770/N800 users and we have all been suspicious of Nokia's motives. Well now the cat is out of the bag and Nokia is just another borge like "we hate freedom if we cant control it" company. As many previous posters have said "Nokia wants DRM so it can sell music" even though its customers hate DRM and many video and audio people have swapped to ogg. Oh well it was nice knowing you Nokia, farewell and thanks for all the crackly calls.
I have only seen one post mention OMA. OMA(Open Mobile Alliance) to which Nokia is a part of has already defined a standard DRM for binary. MP3 doesn't have DRM by default(that I am aware of), but I can send an MP3 to most modern phones in such a way as to prevent you from sending it to a friend or saving it to removable media. Declaring that a fault of OGG is that it has no DRM support is rubbish as at the very basic it can support this OMA Forward Lock. Nokia is just working the system to invalidate an open standard that it really doesn't like.
Almost the whole range of Samsung has OGG/Vorbis support built-in.
Also, there are a lot of "NoName" asian, or less known brands (most of the time re-packaged asian "nonames") that support Swiss Bull-It is such re-packager, most of their player support OGG/Vorbis out of the box, some other after a firmware upgrade.
I know there are even OGG/Vorbis supporting devices in the "USB stick" form factor (my brother has one).
In fact, appart the few "Big Brands" who usually support only MP3 (because it's such a huge standard that they can't avoid it) and WMA/ATRAC/AAC+DRM or whatever is the proprietary format of their associated shop ; most lesser brands will support OGG because there's no technical limitation preventing it, there's no patent to prevent them, and that enables them to add another bullet point to their list, with very minimal efforts (There's already an open-source integer-math only implementation called Tremor - adding OGG support for a player usually just means recompiling tremor for whatever version of ARM serves as the player's CPU).
Sasmung is more an exception for being both a known brand and providing OGG support.
As a matter of fact, I've always encouraged people to keep a copy of their library in a loss-less format too.
This way, there's no quality loss in case of quality loss, in the event of having to shift formats, or use a newer version of the usual codec with better compression.
Depends on what format the people chosed to save their library into.
I've already had friends with their libraries of WMA changed into coaster because they reinstalled windows, or changed some hardware which triggered windows thinking that it is on a different PC.
On the other hand, all you need to play OGGs is just to choose your player wisely. Either stick only 1 brand (Samsung ), or if you want to go for the cheap, accept having a player with an obscure name that nobody has ever heard about (and which will have changed business before next year)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Alice, still puzzled, retorts "well, here's what I think about your pseudo intellectual ramblings" as she pushes Humpty Dumpty off the wall.
So what did we learn? If you are a large fragile object don't insult people while you are perched on a high ledge.
Funny or insightful? You decide.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Supporters for Ogg/Theora are voting for a Ross Perot, assuring that we'll really get a George Bush. What we really need is an Al Gore: centrist, workable, functional, capable, and proven to work.
If that analogy lost you:
Then you might actually have some knowledge of the political positions advanced by all three candidates, what they've done in practice, and maybe even what f'ing YEARS they ran for office in.
But hey, why vote for Nader when hoping for a Jackson when you can get a Goldwater instead?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's easy to see what they want for video (h264), audio (aac), but I don't know what they want for a container format, except they want DRM (container format is the component that implements DRM, I would guess, but I'm quite possibly wrong). They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution, so patent trolls have not had a reason to come out, and it scares them. Theora is patented, but On2 already said it would be no problem, but Nokia is concerned about a non-obvious company waiting for a single big player to adapt those technologies to bring a suit.
The three suggestions they give are interesting. The first is to stay out of it, making interoperability difficult, as they said, but they effectively dismiss it because look how great Flash is without being a standard (that's a good argument to actually dictate something as far as I'm concerned). The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard, as it would mean delivering poorer quality content or being incredibly costly bandwidth wise. All it takes is one or two sites to deviate, but provide a richer standard to make standards compliance mean absolutely nothing. The final suggestion they are confident would lead to H264 and AAC, and they certainly wouldn't mind that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Go to http://www.mpegla.com for the details.
The parent said nothing about proprietary and talked about how it was an open format, however your reply was written in a manner to contradict what he said. If you can't figure out how to start your own thread in the discussion rather than hijacking someone else's higher-up thread, you need to turn in your geek card and just forget about posting on Slashdot.
- Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux (closed-source, proprietary variant of Windows CE)
- Gnumeric: For all your spreadsheet needs (based on Lotus 1-2-3, a hot new player in the spreadsheet market)
- VNC: Leverage the proprietary power of Microsoft's RDP protocol for remote access!
And much more! Please respond to clue@nokia.com to pick up your prize today.512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Your nerdy protests to the contrary, ogg is an audio format. There is no vorbis.
In this world, we use file extensions to determine data type. Apple even does it now.
You think we use MIME types? Bullshit! We pretend to use MIME types. A web server looks at the file extension, maps it to a MIME type, and sends the file. Most web browsers ignore the MIME type if they have a file extension. This is good, because the web server just pulled the MIME type out of its ass. Who can best decide, a server with an old MIME database or a client with all the latest players installed? It's not as if the MIME type was supplied when the file was first created on the filesystem. No, the file was created with an extension. All MIME types do is cause inconsistency.
Ogg has a small bit of inertia as an audio format, which is good. The "best" you can do fighting that is to sow confusion in the market. What, are you trying to kill ogg? Every silly claim that "ogg is not a codec" is fuel for the competition, which you should note has a massive head start.
One of the sibling posters hinted at it, but let me spell it out since you're still +5.
AAC is just as unencumbered as Ogg-Vorbis and (when unencrypted) has about the same market share. AAC is implemented in QT and on the iPod, therefore this is NOT about DRM. Fairly irrefutable.
If you want my opinion on what it *is* about, I would say it's about the "black box" approach Apple has to the user experience. Apple isn't going to do anything unless it works with *everything* they make. Therefore, regardless of how simple the codec itself is, Ogg-Vorbis is going to take a certain amount of labor to implement, and so it's not gonna get done. AAC gets implemented since it's the basis for the iTMS encrypted format, and MP3 gets done because of market share. Nothing else. It's the Apple Way (tm).
This appears to be a case of poor sentence construction, with a misplaced modifier and a missing comma. It looks like the guy is just a bad writer.
And here I was all ready with a joke about Mitt Romney calling secularism a "religion" last week!
Dear Nokia:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Bring back Sirius Punk!
They're trying to move into content to keep from being marginalized by the carriers as "just another handset vendor".
The carriers want to do their own content stuff and Nokia are pissing them off (see the recently launched http://nokia.music.co.uk./
The fact that they want to cheer for DRM is just a reflection of their attempt to switch revenue models.
When you're just selling hardware it's "Go! Go! Do what you want! Just buy our hardware!".
When you're selling "content" it's "No! No! Mine! Mine! Pay Me or I'll sue you!"
Guess Nokia thinks that mobile music is "the future" and they'll ride the corpses of the record company catalogs
off into the sunset..
Just my $0.07 USD speculation (I'd say two cents, but with the way the dollar is going... well... you know..)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
'nuff said in the subject header. The parent post is spot on and well researched. (Plus think of all that silicon out there that already decodes MPEG-4 in hardware, why take the performance hit for Theora for no end benefit at all.)
These guys are currently building DRM for the OGG Vorbis. If I'm right to assume, they are also setting their sites on the entire OGG container for their DRM solution, supporting both theora and vorbis. I don't really understand Nokia's beef at all. It's all a bunch of nonsensical ramblings on about how they're grouchy with W3C's decisions. The situation is all very liken to when you give a child their juice in the wrong coloured cup.
Okay, I am now under the impression that I do not understand some crucial part of DRM and I need someone to clear this up for me.
My (possibly incorrect) understanding of the general idea of DRM schemes was - in very broad strokes - encrypting the file and only decrypting it or parts of it during playback. Why then does it matter if a file format "supports" DRM when you can wrap a crypto scheme around it? It it more secure in some way to have a special container for the restricted audio stream, or somehow more flexible on the developer end?
Could somebody clear this up for me please?
in terms of the apple-related issues, let's not forget Jobs has a hefty interest in hollywood - his former ownership of pixar bought him the largest single share of disney (~7%) & he still sits on the disney/pixar steering committee - so his interests here can hardly be said to be unconflicted
Try to get one of those players on Ebay:
http://www.rockbox.org/manual.shtml
Except for the Archos models they all support OGG:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WhyRockbox
And Rockbox REALLY rocks!
And you should get one of those on Ebay on a small budget
The word "proprietary" indicates that a party, or proprietor, exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property. This doesn't mean that it's under any particular license, it just means that there's a mechanism to control it. For example, having an effective monopoly over the development of a package or format makes it proprietary whether the licensing terms are restrictive or not.
The real tests for whether a product is proprietary are whether it could be effectively forked or not, or whether the proprietor could impose the adoption of features or force changes in the product without a fork happening. Whether Ogg qualifies as proprietary under this "de facto" definition, I don't know, but the possibility shouldn't be automatically rejected out of hand.
I am not sure, but as far as I remember Theora was said to be better suited for streaming.
I think it's high time we had a !idiots tag.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
not Humpty Dumpty. Your pre-school graduation certificate has been revoked.
Signed, Miss Grundy.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Also afaik vorbis and theora are not ITU, ISO or whatever standards, that's why they say they are propriatery.
Of microsoft got OOXML fast-tracked as a standard, would that have made it any less proprietary?
Proprietary doesn't mean "it's not GPL" and it doesn't mean "it's not ISO". It means there's a proprietor who has effective control or ownership of it. Whether it is, in short, "property". You can even have standards based on proprietary formats... like MP3 (licensed by Fraunhofer). Whether Xiph has effective control over Ogg or not, at this point, I don't know... but that's independant of whether it's adopted as a standard.
why is HTML5 standardizing or recommending anything in regards to video content?
Both are patent-encumbered at the moment, and AAC sounds a lot better.
No, people don't love mp3 because of iTunes, it's the other way around -- iTunes would not exist, were it not for mp3. People don't particularly love mp3, either, they just assume it's the only option out there -- kind of like Windows on PCs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Although Nokia is doing well world-wide, Nokia has an aging, proprietary software infrastructure, and they are now facing open source Android in addition to iPhone and Windows Mobile. It is in Nokia's interest to narrow the field and impose additional costs on their competitors, and forcing the adoption of proprietary and DRM'ed audio and video codecs is one way of doing that.
In addition, a non-DRM'ed codec simply doesn't fit in with their new "service"-oriented business model, where, in addition to charging for the handset, they want to be able to sell you lots of stuff over the air--ring tones, video clips, TV channels--stuff that in Google's world view would simply end up being free and ad supported.
I replied before I read this comment, otherwise I would have modded you up.
We are a small webdev company and I have been trying to make sense of the patent mess as far as video goes for ages, after I spent some time investigating what is required to LEGALLY make video work on the web.
Anyone can build a youtube equivalent using FFMPEG with some simple scripts and other tools chained together. Unfortunately in the process you'd almost certainly be violating various patents. Trying to find out which ones they are, or commercial tools to do the same job, is really not very easy.
I'm currently waiting for a response from MPEG-LA about what's involved in correctly licensing an open source software package (using, say, x264) for h.264 encoding.
They're severely confused. "Ogg" isn't even a codec. It's a container format that can be used to transport and synchronize Vorbis and Theora streams (as well as other formats, IIRC).
http://outcampaign.org/
Nokia argues that they need DRM for their business model and that H.264 supports it while Ogg doesn't. Well, they are wrong. H.264 doesn't support DRM any more or any less than Ogg does.
All DRM solutions right now are non-standard and proprietary, so which codec one chooses for video is immaterial. Furthermore, a DRM standard that is tied to a particular codec is a really bad idea, because it means that the DRM mechanisms will have to be reimplemented when the video codec changes.
So, maybe there should be an open DRM standard. If so, it should be a generic DRM container format, and it should be standardized separately from the codec.
DRM-related arguments, however, are unrelated to which codec to pick. The only reason Nokia would care is because either they just don't like patent-unencumbered codecs, or because they already have their own proprietary DRM solution for an existing standard and don't want to change. Actually, I think in the case of Nokia, it's both.
There is no need to re-encode. I'd say about 1/3 of the players in the store (at least where I shop) support Ogg; anything from cheap Asian players to high-end multimedia monsters. Samsung supports Ogg on many (all?) of their players.
Either you haven't been looking very hard, or you're trolling.
Ogg is not "equal or superior to most other codecs" because it's not a codec. It's a container file that holds content compressed using a codec.
You're splitting hairs and not being reasonable. The term "Ogg" has taken on the meaning of "Vorbis inside an Ogg container" and "Theora inside an Ogg container". That's why people talk about audio and video players "supporting Ogg".
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd.
Nobody was using any of the other video standards before they were adopted as standards either.
In any case, you're completely missing the point here. The issue is not whether Ogg is a good format for video on the web, it's what Nokia's opposition to it means. And Nokia's opposition is plainly driven by a desire to keep new and smaller players out, because Nokia is quite comfortable with costly and proprietary standards.
Thank you Nokia for making my decision a whole lot easier. A friend and I are in the market for a new cellphone/smart phone, thanks to this info Nokia is now out of the question. Thanks for making easier to choose.
[alk]
If you go to DECS's home page, you'll see that he's strongly biased in favor of all things Apple. So, take his comments with a big lump of salt. In his Apple-centric world-view, of course, MPEG4 and AAC are the natural Internet audio and video formats, and, of course, DRM is the right way of doing business.
nt
Guys, Apple isn't opposed to open standards; it uses them (H.264 and AAC are both published by The international standards organization, if that's a hint). Apple has not 'aggressively' either opposed Ogg or proposed 264/AAC for HTML5, merely stated that even if Ogg etc. were to be mandated, Apple might not support them, given uncertainty about the possible IPR position. I don't believe that Apple is listed as claiming IPR in AAC, either. Yes, H.264 and AAC carry patent costs. Finally, you might notice the recommendation from the engineers in the HTML5 group that the W3C staff investigate this issue, since they believed that (like many of the people here), the engineers in the group are not qualified to talk about IPRs and license issues, are often barred from reading patents by their employers, and could be seen has having a vested interest.
This is confusing. The paper from Nokia states, 'Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a "free" codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg, ..., by W3C, is, in our
opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and
therefore not our choice'
Whereas the Vorbis sya that 'Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.'
Nokia is not it elf claiming ownership? Is it an obvious mistake or something else? Will some clarify as to what is correct?
Even if it is "proprietary" I will use for free anyways! It is too late to put the genie back in bottle. Lots of people use it for free and will continue to do so.. How in the hell is Nokia EVER going to enforce any thing to stop us from doing so? To hell with Nokia.
Look. It's Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is the container. Vorbis is the format. If you can't handle that, if you think it's too geeky, please step away from your computer and smash it to bits, as you're far too stupid to deal with modern technology. Might I suggest a career in waste disposal?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Support for video and ogg vorbis on inexpensive, tiny devices. Best of all worlds.
Discriminatory licensing would be for me to license the rights to a given patent to the FOSS community but NOT license it to MS because they've been naughty.
Non-discriminatory licensing is where anyone that pays the up-front and ongoing royalty price gets to license it.
If I license it for FREE, then that's the price.
If I license it for a fifty cents per instance using the hypothetical patent then that's the price.
Anyone stepping up to the plate gets to license.
RAND (Reasonable And...) means that it has to be some realistic thing per unit- say zero to something proportionate to it's liability to be used, for example the MP3 patents are licensed out in a reasonable fashion (Reasonable being if you're implementing DVD players or portable music players...). Unreasonable would be something like $500 per instance for something like that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Non-discriminatory doesn't mean "Doing whatever anyone wants," it just means being consistent. In the case of a license it means two things:
1) The license must be available to all comers. You do not get to choose who gets a license, anyone who pays the fee gets a license.
2) The fee must be fixed. One person can't get a sweetheart deal and another get the shaft.
You meet those criteria, that is a non-discriminatory license, you aren't discriminating.
Take a situation where I own a bar. If I have a night where I sell beer to any customer for $2, that's a non-discriminatory special. Whoever you are, you get to have beer for that price. However if I run a special where only girls in tight shirts get $2 beers, that's a discriminatory special. I am dictating who or what you must be or do to get the pricing.
Trying to redefine things just because you don't like how it works doesn't change how it really is. You aren't being discriminated against just because someone won't give you something for free. You are only being discriminated against if they will give it to someone else for free, but not you.
The current perception ? WTF ?
Well, it's true. The current perception is that Ogg is free. It just so happens that the current perception is also correct this time. Hooray!
AAC is a licensed standard of MPEG-4. It is not free and open, and it certainly has a much larger market share than ogg audio formats (again, none of this is about audio, but video, so take my response as a response to the non relevant post...)
.ogg. We the /. crew do NOT represent the consumer space - we represent the tech geek space.
;)
AAC is implemented in QuickTime, true, and probably in Trolltech's QT (not sure which QT you were referring to). It is ALSO implemented in the XBox 360, the Zune, Real Player, Sony PSP and PS3, and most players these days. It is also the base audio CODEC for HD DVD and for Bluray. There is no disputing AAC has a lot of support, and WAY more support than
AAC got implemented by Apple because it had way better features than Mp3 (support for more channels, higher bit depths, better quality at the same size, industry support, and being wrapped in DRM IF NECESSARY (not required). Also, ogg did not even EXISTS at the time Apple adopted AAC as their standard (and no, it is not THEIR standard, it is an open licensable standard)
But I digress - this is supposed to be about video
--
"You sir, have no right being president" - Keith Olbermann
DRM systems are not compatible with digital freedom: coercive software on personal devices is bare evil, period.
That's the worse excuse I've ever heard. I wonder if Nokia would have objected all those years ago when JPEG was selected as a baseline image format for the web -- it has no DRM you know? And as we all know, without DRM it'll be doomed! Oh wait...
I've always viewed Theora as the video equivalent of JPEG - it's quality is not the best, it doesn't have all the features of the shiny newest codecs - but it can be made to work everywhere. You don't need permission, and don't need to pay anyone for the privilege. There may be patent leech issues sure, but that's a risk with every other single codec - Theora is no more at risk than any other developed in the last 10 years.
...bitbuckets arranged in a champagne-glass fountain type stack. it must be analogous to something.
After realizing there was no reason to fight MPEG-4 with a proprietary runner up, On2 donated Theora to Xiph to use with Ogg, and Xiph published it as an open specification. However, Microsoft basically did the same thing: it published WMV with the SMPTE group as an "open standard" called VC1.
This seriously misses (or should that be evades) the point. VC1 was pushed as a standard because Microsoft own/owned the encoding business and desperately needed to grow a moribund market. They must have been desperate because management forgot just how many patents it infringes, some of them from MP4!
Like MP4, VC1 licences cost money and there's nothing Microsoft or SMPTE can do to change that. With that come restrictions. Ogg+vorbis/Theora come without the fees or restrictions because someone remembered to check for patent problems and negotiate the right licences. You want to mess with VC1, expect to pay for the privilege, even if you just implement the naked spec. In that sense the Ogg+codec format is truly more open.
So why bring up GPL?
When it comes to W3C requirements, you should be asking yourself "can Apache use it"? If not, then no, it cannot be a standard requirement.
/dev/null is a file! and it's very important to system operation. You should never overwrite your /dev/null.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I have recently written what I believe is the world's fastest Ogg Vorbis decoder, it takes about 600 ms to decode my longest song sample (4:05 minutes encoded with 192 Kbit/s for a final filesize of 5.7 MB).
IMHO there are just a few problems with Vorbis, cpu load is not one of them:
a) It is not at all suitable for contineous streaming, with multiple receivers connecting/disconnecting on the fly, since you have to start by decoding the 4-8 KB header before you can make any sense of the sound frames.
b) To get decent decoding performance, you have to unpack & cache all the codebook information in the header packets, this requires from about 50 to 300 KB, which can be significant in a small device.
c) Even though Vorbis is in theory independent of the Ogg container format, most existing source code expects to find Ogg frames surrounding all Vorbis packets. This is an implementation and not a specification problem.
d) Vorbis really prefers to have fast fp support available, but Theora is an open-source fixed-point implementation which has been used as the starting point for quite low-resource embedded implementations.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Good discussion, but anyone who's any one knows that WMA achieves transparency with CD audio at 64kpbs and so already the de facto winner of the format wars. (wink)
Why does it matter whether format xyz supports DRM? Can't DRM be overlaid on any arbitrary format with the simple use of encryption?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Since when does the W3C standard matter to the world anyway?
I'm a web programmer by day, and let me tell you that at least 80% (if not more) of the sites out there do not respect a single recommendation the W3C publishes. Yea, they're "just" that: "recommendations".
As a matter of fact, most of the time when you're trying to play by the books and follow their recommendations, you end up with sites that do not work across all the major browsers (mainly IE), and you have to hack around it or break the "standard".
Bottom line is, whatever the W3C decides is not what everyone is going to do. I have yet to see a browser that implements the W3C recommendations to the T, but that's a different story.
Vorbis' CPU requirements are less than AAC's. However, a lot of player hardware has accelleration support for AAC and not Vorbis. Also, Vorbis is a bit more memory intensive than AAC, which on some platforms (the nearly-cacheless ARM in the original ipod) is a problem for pure software implementations.
There is a $1/unit hardware vorbis decoder chip out there which draws less than 50mw. All the modern software based players have CPUs which are easily fast enough for Vorbis, without any loss of battery life.
The issues here are not technical. They are political. If you ship free formats in your device you pay 10x the licensing fees for MP3 and AAC. It's good old fashion monopoly extension tactics for the win.
The W3C HTML5 proposed standard allows any codec to be included, but Ogg/Theora+Vorbis is recommended as a baseline. Other than another 100k of flash storage, including that as an option along side whatever H.264 DRM++ codec would be harmless to Nokia, but the additional fees they would need to pay for H.264/AAC licensing because they included free formats would make that decision quite uneconomical indeed.
I am just curious as to what the advantages of Ogg are over AAC? AAC is already part of MPEG4 and has plenty of associated implementations, including a number of open source ones. Other than the fact it was developed outside the realm of a large corportation, what is Ogg gving me?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The last of the patents required for making a high quality MP3 encoder was granted in 1998 and should expire around 2018.
I would *hope* that long before 2018 we'll have new generations of codecs which make MP3 seem quite pathetic by comparison, which will, of course be even more proprietary than MP3 unless we break this cycle. Otherwise years before MP3 expires the codec licensing folks will drive MP3 out of everyone's devices by offering really attractive pricing to device makers who exclude it or degrade it just as they do with Ogg/Vorbis today.
And even if you don't buy the above argument, what are we to do until then? I think you're dismissing Xiph's efforts too quickly.
Ok, WoW and Guitar Hero II are two targets that might be appealing, however, I think a patent troll might still choose to hold their hand waiting for a popular commercial music player to adopt Vorbis decoding features. Targetting a one-off game or handful of such games would severely limit the amount of reward for revealing their patent, compared to say, if Apple added Vorbis capability to an iPod at some point. Vorbis could have incorporated a patented method accidently as late as 2000 or so, theoretically (basic concept is older, but anyway). There could still enough life left on the patent that a patent troll is willing to wait just a bit longer to potentially maximize the investment.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Maybe that explains why we here can find a huge lot of different models of OGG-enabled memory USB sticks and players,
while the US
Forcing a non-standart proprietary protocol when a perfectly open exists for file transfers ? And on top of that forbidding a concurrent open standard for audio ?
That won't even have the life expectancy of a snow flake in Hell's lava pool if brought to an European court.
That explains a lot about the disparity between US and EU players.
(And shows a lot about the justice in the "USA, Land Of The Free Corporations".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I don't drink, but I am feeling very sheepish for missing such an important option. Thank you for informing my ignorance - the insult is deserved.
I'm not inclined to read a position paper that has a typo on the second page which a spell-checker could easily fix.
... it lacks the warmth an rhythm of the source version so, as an audiophile, it is abhorent to me - even on my Anjou cables.
This just in. The Queen of England has declared the English language proprietary and has begun issuing cease-and-desist notices (and, in the US, DMCA takedowns) on non-British dictionaries, thesauri, and style guides. Also, pencils, printers, and word processing programs are copyright circumvention tools.
Holy crap, for someone with such a low id you are soooo clueless
http://xiph.org/ogg/ has "The Ogg container format" as the first headline.
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions addresses your other bumfoolery.
r00t, you've been p0wned.
I wrote that in the context of the frankest possible assessment of Theora toward bringing it up to 'best-in-class' status. Have a look at the development resources being put into it right now, especially the 'theora-exp' and 'theora-thusnelda' branches. Thusnelda is the most active, and has just moved from the 'remove all the dodge' phase into 'rebuild from the good' phase. Theora-exp is a complete implementation directly from spec with no relationship to the original VP3 code (Thusnelda is a hybrid of pieces of the original VP3 code, pieces of theora-exp, and my own optimization work). The improvements realized in exp and thusnelda are already moving into the mainline.
We fully intend to bring Theora's performance up to par with the current state of the art while maintaining a much lower complexity requirement. That's one piece missing from the discussion so far; Theora is a much simpler codec that h264 or MPEG4, yet we expect it to stay competetive for a number of years yet. You'd think that would be important to mobile manufacturers. It is certainly important to OLPC. You can encode and decode Theora HD video entirely in C; the others require aggressive assembly to acheive realtime.
Anyway, the link you provide is an unflinching, critical identification of inadequacies and we're knocking off those inadequacies one by one (several of those 'inadequacies' exist in other codecs, BTW, including MPEG4 and h264). Theora has followed an arc very similar to Mozilla after it was cast off by the dying netscape. We've just reached the point where it's picking up development speed because people realize, oh shit, we actually need this...