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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.
"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!
Fully documentable nothin'! Theora and Vorbis are fully documented. If you can't figure out how to make your own implementation from the docs and/or by studying one of the many existing implementations out there, you need to turn in your geek card and just forget about developing software.
Proprietary would imply that independent implementations cannot be made or cannot be made easily without violating patents or reverse engineering or whatever. Vorbis and Theora are nothing of the sort -- they are fully open and unencumbered.
My blog
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.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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?
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.
that's an anachronistic spelling.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
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.
Ok after looking at the website, it is probably both. He can't really speak English and he is a nut. However, Nokia is a really big company with lots of divisions, so I would not take it too too seriously
My little Linux and tech blog
- 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.
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.
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
"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."
Fact check: Youtube accepts video in almost any codec and (as they have mentioned (it was in respect to their coming higher definition video) in the past) stores an unaltered copy, then they essentially transcode everything to H264 and wrap it in FLV. Google would likely be fine with converting it to whatever, as they have already shown with the iphone, which doesn't use FLV (but does use H264).
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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
The W3C tries to make the web standard easily accessible to everyone, whether they are running Linux, windows, BSD, OSX or another operating system. They also try to make it where the standards can be implemented on any browser. By adopting a standard video and audio codec, browsers can support these 'out of the box' and users won't have to download codecs to view videos or hear a pod cast. It is still up to the website designers if they want to follow the standards, so they aren't telling you to do anything. Instead they are trying to make it where your choices don't impede your access to the web.
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 ]
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.
It's used heavily in gaming because of the ultra high nearly lossless compression. It's an excellent format. Just because it's not as popular with software developers doesn't mean there are quality issues. Gaming is extremely concerned with compression ratios so it's a good solution for them. If you used .wave instead the audio files could end up being bigger than the entire rest of the game. Video and audio tend to be similar in size but audio can be compressed far more without the slow decompression that some video formats require. There are other solutions like MPEG but Ogg handles higher compressions with less loss. I was stunned the first time I compressed a file to Ogg. My .wave files were compressing to 5% with little decernable loss. I ran them several times and rechecked the file size just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. If you need super high compression with good quality I've never seen anything like Ogg.
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!
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.
Ogg is like Quicktime or ASF. There's nothing technically stopping anybody from delivering a mp3 inside an Ogg (seriously), Quicktime, or ASF container. Here's proof:
Putting a
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!
HTML5 is a very practical attempt to define additional elements and set a standard for all the things Web developers do today, but in a wide variety of ways that leads to incompatibility problems or just really complex code. I like it because when I built some XHTML for uses I needed I came up with many of the same basic tags, even using the same, fairly logical names as what they did.
I don't think anyone would argue that one common thing Web pages do today is provide streaming videos. I don't think anyone would deny that depending on the format used and the way it is embedded, different video behaves differently, not all video will play on all browsers and OS's, and it is really hard for browser and OS coders to create easy, standard ways to manipulate that video as a result. Would it be nice if the Firefox team made a way to make embedded videos fullscreen with a key press? Maybe add some translucent controls that will pop up over it when you move the mouse? Maybe allow you to right click on videos and add them to a fullscreen viewing queue that will all play end to end? Standardizing on a video format that can play everywhere is the first step to making that a reality.
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?No, they're recommending the exact opposite. By standardizing on the "img" tag for embedding images or on the Ogg-Theora format for streaming video they're insuring that any OS and any browser that conform to the standards will let you view streaming video. You theoretically won't have to worry if the browser on your smartphone supports Silverlight, or if Firefox on Linux supports MPEG in a QuickTime container, or if your game console supports Flash videos. So long as they support the standard, they'll all show streaming video, which is what standards are supposed to be about.
Now I'm not endorsing Ogg as that standard and I'm not convinced it will lead to better results than standardizing on H.261. I think ignoring the wrapper component, or choosing a wrapper that cannot support DRM, might lead to the standard being ignored. I'm not sure the big players in the industry will buy into Ogg-Theora. Still, standardizing on a wrapper format and specifying Ogg Theora at least as a preferred option, might well do a lot of good for end users.
I mean, seriously, I don't see what this even has to do with html.Yeah, and implementers of the first version of HTML would not have seen what images had to do with it, since they were only supported as links and everyone was doing them differently. Times change. Browser don't generally run in a terminal anymore. A big use for Web pages these days is displaying video, and the new standard should reflect that and make it easy and uniform.
You simply did not understand his point at all.
.ogg files is associated by the public with audio files. Again this is not technically correct but the only ones really caring is other geeks.
.ogg files containing audio should be called .ogg and came up with a new file ending and name for files with video (or audio & video) in them, perhaps .ogv or something.
.avi and .mov is video files. They have no idea it is really codecs and containers. If you want people to question why their ipod does not play ogg files, you don't want to confuse the issue with fighting long lost battles over semantics.
IT DOES NOT MATTER one single iota that ogg is a container and not a codec, it is simply pointless unless your an engineer (a real geeky one at that).
He did not contend the fact that this is incorrect, only pointed out that to the majority of people (who ever heard about ogg) then:
ogg == audio codec == compressed audio.
The fact is, you should be über happy if most people makes this connection, even if it is technically imperfect.
It is a market awareness that is worth is weight in gold, don't squander it away by being a stereotypical geek that picks on technical issues that no one really cares about.
That it is wrong is completely pointless for most people and only confuses the issue. At least 90% of people associates content type with the file ending and
It would be much better if xiph declared that only
You are technically correct but 'joe sixpack' wanting his 'mp3 player' to play ogg files does not care or even understand the difference.
To the majority of people mp3 is synonymous with audio files for portable devices, just like they think
This is just like the old battle about what being a hacker means. To much more than 90 percent of the population it means someone breaking into computer systems. Now you and me probably knows this was not the original meaning at all, but it does not matter because the 'wrong meaning' is by now so enforced by media that people only stares strangely at you if you try educating them.
Now if you want ogg, vorbis and theora to succeed as open standards used everywhere, it would be a much better strategy going with the flow and not against it.
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 article, and the discussion, and the whole shebang, are meant for professionals, not ignoramuses like you and the dude you're defending. The fact that you do or do not know what container or compression format we use to deliver websites to you means absolutely nothing at all. So, take your self important bullshit about "market awareness" and shove it up your ass. My mom doesn't know what MPEG2 compression is, but she still uses the DVD player I bought her. This is no different, and your collective ignorance is of no more consequence than hers.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't care. I've never seen a .vorbis file. All I've ever seen is a .ogg file, .ogg files contain music that plays well on my computer, but unlike .mp3-files, not so well on my mp3-player.
Look, if you can't handle that 99% of the world just doesn't care about containers and codecs, but use the file extension to determine media format, you are seriously lacking in social intelligence, and need to be confined to live in solitude for the rest of your life. May I suggest a career in computers?
But you'd be seriously lacking in technical intelligence if you assume that file extension = media format. What codecs were used in this .avi, for example? can you tell without analysing the file?
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"