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."

Comments

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

[explosivejared]

Apart from it not supporting DRM

Right there is a pretty big roadblock. Big media isn't interested unless it is going to help with DRM.

Secondly, the average person isn't really all that interested in whatever superior quality ogg has. It's really a nominal difference on most players and in most listening environments. MP3 does just fine for them.

Thirdly, and in conjunction with my second point, MP3 is old, well-known, and for the most part easy to use. People are familiar with it and therefore are reluctant to change. The fact is MP3 got their first. It causes to few real problems to push people to care about open standards. I myself like to think I'm at least a little enlightened/aware of digital media issues, and I don't even have that much ogg in my library. It's probably 90% MP3, then 5% FLAC and ogg.

Moral of the story, MP3 works well enough, and most people hold to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."