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Mozilla Donates $100K To the Ogg Project
LWATCDR writes "Mozilla has given the Wikimedia foundation $100,000 to fund Ogg development. The reason is simple: 'Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets.' While Vorbis is a better standard than MP3, everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs. I wonder if wouldn't be better to direct effort to Dirac, perhaps putting Dirac into an Ogg container. No mention was made of FLAC or Speex funding. If more media players supported Speex it would be an ideal codec for many podcasts and audio books. It really is too bad that these codecs so often get overlooked."
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. On the one hand, $100,000 is serious money. On the other hand, it barely pays for a good developer for one year.
If that's all the resources that one of the most prominent open source foundations has to fight proprietary software, we're in trouble.
Anyway, where does one apply for more grants from the Mozilla foundation? Here are the grant amounts for 2007, see if you can read a subliminal message:
- mozdev.org: $10,000
- Parrot: $10,000
- Dojo Ajax toolkit: $70,000
- Jambu: $10,000
- NVDA: $90,000
- creatives commons: $100,000
- seneca college: $100,000
- Gnome: $10,000
- coreboot: $10,000
--
The 5 Steps to a Great Startup Idea
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
-- Cheers!
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
Now when listening to music on a PC those additional cycles might be a drop in the ocean but what we've seen is a lot of MP3 players skipping the codec because their cheap devices couldn't handle the playback load.
Dirac is developed by the BBC. I don't think $100,000 is really going to make a bit of difference to them. And if the money has gone to the Ogg project who says that part of it won't go to making Ogg support Dirac from their end?
As far as Theora performance, Wikipedia has this to say:
Sources close to Xiph.org have stated that the performance characteristics of the current Theora reference implementation are mostly dominated by implementation issues inherited from the original VP3 code base
I have no idea if that's accurate or not, but assuming it is it sounds like Theora's performance problems could largely be solved given enough resources to rewrite code. $100,000 isn't a bad place to start.
...of "There Can Be Only One, and it's Adobe® Flash®!"/"'Ogg' sounds stupid!" posts...
I can't say I necessarily care for their implementation of the <audio> and <video> tags in the HTML 5 proposals, but at least this'll give a plugin-free and license-fee-free way of doing audio and video in Firefox and Opera...and supposedly Safari.
Of course, Safari only supports "Apple Quicktime" as usual, but I'm guessing that installing XiphQT would let it work with the same media as Firefox and Opera...
I imagine the DirectShow plugins for Ogg Vorbis/Theora might eventually solve the problem for those who insist on using IE, too, if Microsoft ever catches up to HTML5.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
While it's not a lot of money, I think the more important detail is that Mozilla is backing OGG. When Mozilla backed PNG, many websites started replacing their old patent-encumbered GIFs with PNGs, and even IE started to support PNG format.
While I agree that Theora is far from complete, OGG does not imply Theora. Theora is simply a free codec that can be stuffed in an OGG container. Once again, Mozilla opens the door to web developers who believe in open standards, and certainly there are development teams who will loathe their MP3s and replace them with unecumbered OGG/Vorbis. Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
This can only be a Good Thing. Small shops that don't want to mess around with licensing fees will have a good alternative to use for streaming audio (and later video). More importantly, those streams can be saved by customers for later use. Proprietary solutions to streaming audio/video usually cripple the player in such a way that the end user can't save the file (Flash for instance).
Mozilla is one of the heavy hitters, IMO. Their financial support and commitment to Open Standards have been a thorn in Microsoft's side since Netscape was released. Way to go Mozilla!
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I am more familiar with OPP, which I am down with BTW
Changing the name to something less silly sounding than "Ogg" would have more effect than any amount of money.
Vorbis lose out in power consumption if your base of comparison is player with a dedicated mp3 silicon vs running a software implementation of vorbis on a generic CPU, which was a realistic scenario a couple of years ago, I agree. Because it's a more advanced and better sounding codec, vorbis requires a bit more memory (or to be more precise, the bounds are looser). There's been talk about a 'mobile profile' but I don't think anything came of it. I think it's a bit late anyhow, if we'd had one from the beginning things might have turned out different.
None the less, I have several gigabytes if vorbis on my iAudio D2, a two hour commute per day, and I recharge it on the weekends. Vorbis wins every day in my life.
Anyone remember when every Slashdot article had comments asking "but does it play Ogg?"
Not to be confused with Oog the Open Source Caveman.
Anyway, I haven't heard or thought about Ogg files in a couple years now. Good luck with that, I guess.
"Who even uses OGG. Who has even heard of it?"
Exactly.
While a handful of programming geeks are fiddling with OGG because it's open source and not "patent-encumbered" the rest of the world couldn't care less. I can download a copy of WinAmp for free and it plays my nasty evil patent-encumbered MP3s just fine. Same with my inexpensive MP3 player.
Anyone know why OGG seems to get more support than Matroska? Matroska seems like the more flexible and better container format.
All music players have to support MP3 in any case, without this the public won't buy. .mp3 files are what people swap, rip, and play. It's been almost 15 years.
So every normal manufacturer will pay the MP3 licensing fees (which are really a software patent tax, but let's not go there), and optimise their hardware for MP3 playback.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Is Ogg therefore dead? Yes, along with all other "funny" formats, on the general-purpose music player.
Where Ogg should excel is in pure software applications, especially in heavily patented areas like VoIP where there is no hardware cost, where it's trivial to add codecs, and where the current state of play penalizes cheaper solutions.
IOW it'll only work in end-to-end solutions where it can be both encoder and decoder, and resolve the issue of patent costs on the whole system.
My blog
It's not a hardware issue. Vorbis has similar CPU demands to AAC.
Unless the player has an ASIC that can decode MP3 and AAC but not Vorbis.
I nearly spat all over my monitor/kb when I misread : "Microsoft donates 100k to ogg."
Wiggy.
Media players don't start and stop with handheld music. Just as Linux made huge inroads into the embedded market before becoming credible as a desktop system, Ogg may well have applications where the customer only cares about the end result, not the method.
An example is the popular Tomtom satnav, which uses Ogg for (presumably) prerecorded speech (and also runs linux).
Although such hidden applications might sound unimportant, they create familiarity for developers and PHBs. So as Linux has crept from turnkey systems - like Tomtom - to phones and netbooks, Ogg may do the same. It's perfectly reasonable to use Ogg as an in-system codec as Apple do with their encoder : it doesn't matter that the end user provides the music in another format. And ultimately, it's all over the place : cheap, license-free and open.
So - you'd prefer them to donate money to a project that's already established? In other words, a project that doesn't need money?
Lossy is outdated, lossless is the future, free software should be focusing on it's lossless formats like FLAC.
I do adore how the money is apparently only for "Ogg" (and the OP means Ogg Vorbis) when Ogg is the *container format*.
Speex is just as supported by the Xiph foundation as Vorbis is.
MP3 has clearly won this battle and if it weren't for a few enthusiasts struggling to keep Ogg alive we would all have forgotten about it by now. If Mozilla wants to throw money at something they'd do better investing in FLAC. At least audiophiles are all over that format and if it could be brought down to a more manageable size portable players might pick it up too.
mmmm...forbidden donut
It seems to me that if Sony, Phillips, and all the other big audio/video vendors aren't funding an open source effort then they simply could care less about the licensing costs. If they don't care, why should I care? Afterall, they are the ones who have to pay for usage. Ask 99% of the people out there about audio/video/image licenses and they wouldn't know or even care about them. Completely transparent to the end user.
None of the products that you buy are priced directly by BOM costs. If Sony can save $1 in licensing costs if won't translate to you saving $1 on the price. Although I must admit Im a bit curious what they do pay. It probably comes out out pennies a unit, but that's just a guess.
Have you heard of Wikipedia? It's quite popular, apparently one of the largest websites in the world. They use Ogg exclusively.
The same thing was said about MPEG-4 AVC a.k.a. H.264. Hasn't slowed down Apple from making a bundle.
I encode my stuff in Ogg as only I am going to listen to it. If I want to play it on an MP3 player I'll just buy a Samsung which are well priced and specced and play Ogg. I don't know of any popular Linux music player that doesn't play both MP3 (sometimes with extra download) and Ogg transparently. A "programming geek" doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. This is why he is superior to you.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
hmm not the post I would have chosen for this news... Could have pointed out some of the source post announcements and avoid perpetuating a few misconceptions.
Hence the need for funding the Thusnelda enhancements. Theora is a pretty solid codec and can be greatly improved with a few enhancements on the encoder side.
Dirac is best at high resolution high bitrate video and not so good for standard definition low bitrate video, hence an enhanced theora is the optimal way to hit the low bandwidth target. Enabling theora to be competitive or better than others codecs in the low bitrate range in the intimidate future with relatively small investment.
Furthermore dirac is planed for inclusion and will be explored in the tail end of this grant. (once liboggplay is more solid). Making liboggplay playback library solid will enable Dirac support to be solid as well. Since Dirac already has a maturing decoder/encoder library (Schrodinger) and already been mapped to an ogg container (what liboggplay plays).
It's relatively easy to add in additional free codecs with ogg mappings. if( FLAC, Speex or Dirac) and will not be the primary use of the funding so its not focused in on the announcement or secondary coverage of the announcement.
More info on the announcement here and the above mentioned links.
From the summary:
everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs.
I am not an expert on video codecs, but here is my understanding of the situation.
Theora is a relatively undeveloped technology in comparison with the industry standards of MPEG2 or MPEG4. There are relatively few developers working on it. Overall they have done a pretty good job of defining a standard, but they are still working on improving the encoder. The encoding format is now frozen, which means you can write a decoder and expect it to be able to decode any future Theora bitstream; but the encoders are still being improved. The earliest Theora encoders were pretty terrible, but newer ones have gotten better, to the point where Theora is now more efficient than MPEG2. ("More efficient" meaning encoding the same video at the same quality in fewer bits, or encoding better quality in the same number of bits.) MPEG4 is currently more efficient than Theora, but not free.
There is plenty of room for a clever encoder to reduce the bitstream with video. As a trivial example, suppose we are encoding a scene where a car is driving from left to right. A brain-dead encoder could simply notice that the car pixels have changed, and encode them all over again; a smarter encoder could detect that the next frame looks very much like the previous frame, except that certain pixels have slid over a bit, and instead of re-encoding every changed pixel, the clever encoder can encode "these pixels are like those older pixels, except slid to the right by X amount". It's not easy to write an encoder that can do an optimal job of figuring out the most efficient way to represent the changes between several frames of video. Many more man-years have been spent on proprietary MPEG encoders compared to the time spent on Theora so far.
It is not clear to me how much room for further improvement there might be. Can Theora ever approach MPEG4 for efficiency? My guess is that there are patented technologies in MPEG4 which allow for more efficiency than is possible with Theora, but I don't know to what degree. Note that the Theora guys are saying that Theora is in the same class with MPEG4.
Given that MPEG2 is considered adequate for many purposes, it seems to me that Theora should be adequate for many purposes, and it's free. I have high-speed Internet and I would love it if Youtube and such sites offered Theora video in addition to Flash; the Flash player seems to leak memory a lot and I wish I didn't need it.
I wonder if we will start to see Theora-encoded video cutscenes in video games, just as we have seen Vorbis-encoded audio in video games?
If I got anything wrong in the above, please correct me.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Absolutely correct. There are over 100,000,000 iPods out there, and none of them support .ogg
Consumers are apathetic and ignorant of music standards, what they know is "What's the easiest way to get this CD on my iPod"
Even Microsoft loses the WMA battle, because people have to make their music files MP3 to get transferred to their iPod.
The Wikimedia Foundation does not allow MP3. When one of the biggest websites does not use MP3 but ogg, it makes a serious difference.
Thanks,
GerardM
Uninformed troll you are, sir.
Had you checked any source - even Wikipedia - you would know that Ogg Vorbis is being used extensively in game industry, both for technical superiority (not only that of the codec itself, which could be disputed, but of the library, which is very easy to integrate and fully supported by the Miles Sound System) and legal status. There are no patents on this, so the lawyers (and, consequently, the execs) in the game development studios are happy because they don't have to worry about some random company telling them to pay up a week before release and yet, it costs nothing.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
If they want OGG to be as successful as PNG has been, they're going to need to build an IE plugin (perhaps an ActiveX object). Web site operators need to be able to embed OGG video and audio clips, knowing that it will "just work" on Mozilla, and that IE it's only a couple of clicks away. If it's successful enough, then Microsoft might replace the plugin with built-in functionality. But don't count on it. They really want Silverlight to take over.
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@LWATCDR First you write of great news to open source, Mozilla donates $100k to help development progress to Ogg which has Vorbis and Theora, but then basically say the donation was a waste because it wasn't a different codec. Can't we be grateful that a donation was made in the first place? And a hefty donation at that.
Cheers Mozilla!
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
Hundreds of games use audio in the ogg format.
No license fees to be paid. More money for drm.
"...It really is too bad that these codecs so often get overlooked."
Codecs, even superior ones, often do not get "overlooked", for one simple answer.
You know how corporations spell the word "proprietary"?
P-R-O-F-I-T.
A "programming geek" doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. This is why he is superior to you.
This attitude is also why he can't get a date, and spends his Saturday nights alone in the basement playing World of Warcraft.
It probably doesn't help Ogg Vorbis as a format that there is no standard way to embed album art in a file.
There are more important reasons why it hasn't take off as a format, but those have already been covered here.
So here's another reason to add even if a less important one. Many people like to embed album artwork in their files. In fact, there are whole websites devoted to swapping album-art scans. People who care about that are simply not going to choose a format that doesn't have a standard method to do it.
And? Why are we excited about internal game industry formats?
But whats your point? Maybe im not as wiki-adept as some other people, maybe there is some section somewhere that really throws OGG in your face, but as far as I am aware the only time you bump into it is when you go to play a sample of a song, or maybe the "pronunciation" option, which both play fine in Opera, Firefox and IE for me, thanx to VLC/QuickTime/etc plugin/codecs I already have installed.
Most people would just click it, if it works, fine, if it doesnt work they'll go "wtf is XiphQT? do I have a virus?" and then head off to youtube or something to find a sample.
That's not Shuffle sized, that's Nano sized. I'd go running with a Shuffle, but I would't bother with a Nano or Clip.
mpeg1 layer 2 audio and mpeg 1 layer 3 audio are not forward/backward compatible. They share some blocks in the flowchart, but mp2 is not mp3 with a few blocks stripped off.
If you have an mp3 player/decoder that plays mp2, it's because there's a separate mp2 decoder in there too.
Why do we care that the MP3 has patents and all that? What does it do? Why must this turn into yet another ideological crusade of the FOSS underdog taking the mainstream challenger on in an impossible uphill battle?
You just got troll'd!
So far in the commenting, I've seen all kinds of contradicting opinions.
1. OGG sounds better than MP3 or it does not.
2. OGG uses more processor cycle and kills battery life, OGG makes no difference in comparison to MP3
3. OGG sounds better, MP3 sounds better in most listening tests, MP2 is even better, MP4 is equal to OGG and better than MP3
4. OGG needs to be as succesful as PNG and PNG is just one in a crowd.
Gosh...there is a lot of FUD going around here about something. Could someone in the know please set the record straight ?
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
You need a deep understanding of how the mind perceives sight and sound before you can usefully begin work on compression.
Some sense of the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production - and reproduction.
This is what broadcasters like the BBC bring to the table.
The major studios.
The record labels.
You need experts in many disciplines.
You need controlled experiments with different audiences in different environments.
The coder won't be accomplishing much of anything on his own - and paying his salary is likely to be the least of your problems.
Then the customer won't be using Ogg.
You can use cheaper, mass produced hardware with on chip support for mp3 or mpeg formats far easier than putting a CPU fast enough to deal with Ogg on the device.
Decoders for existing common formats are already built into lots of silicon, Ogg just means higher requirements or new silicon designs for no improvement from the users point of view. You phones, ipods and netbooks aren't going to include audio/video hardware good enough to tell the difference between the formats, but the manufacture IS going to notice the increased production cost. Sure TomTom uses it, but they already have to have a fairly fast processor so they can do routing calculations on the fly, supporting Ogg on the side is easy enough in the spare cycles which get powered by your car rather than a tiny battery. Your phone/ipod isn't going to do that without silicon to do it specifically since using the CPU would result in battery life times on the matter of minutes rather than hours and days.
And for reference, Linux ran on PC, laptops and 'netbooks's long before TomTom had a product, let alone a product running Linux.
I wish people would stop thinking these random little devices running Linux are what made it popular, especially since VERY FEW people actually know what these devices run, and even less actually care.
You state at the end 'ultimately, its all over the place'
But its not, I'm unaware of any device that plays Ogg other than my PC. I'm certainly not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying that I as a techie who watches this sort of stuff could not name a device with native Ogg support so its not really all that popular. My iPhone doesn't, my Windows Mobile PDA wasn't fast enough to play Ogg, played MP3s fine though. I can't go buy an Atmel microcontroller with a Ogg decoder onboard for my projects, I can get one with an mp3 decoder though. I can find assembly for doing the decoding of MP3s on higher end MCUs such as atmegas, avr32s, and PICs with my first google search, can't say the same for Ogg. You specify the TomTom above, but no one other than a few select people know that, its not like its on the cover of the box in big bold letters, but the Windows compatibility logo on the other hand is.
When normal everyday gas station attendants and Toll booth jockies walk around talking about all the Oggs they have on their music players or they downloaded yesterday, THEN its all over the place, right now its an endangered species at best.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
AAC-HE scores a little better than Vorbis at ultra-ultra-low rate in applications where people don't care that Cher sounds like a robot because that's an improvement, amirite? If you're keeping your music in 32kbps files, dude, AAC is totally for you!
Above that though, Vorbis has won every independent comparison I've read, especially the AoTuV encoder.
I'm guessing your reference to drink options is because McDonald's sells beer in Europe? Last time I had it was a decade or so ago, probably in Germany(?), but the beer was lame US-style beer, light-colored and content free. It could have been a cheap pilsner or Stella or something, but to me it seemed like US Budweiser rather than like beer from Budweis.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Eh? I pointed out that one of the largest websites in the world uses Ogg Vorbis... So my point is that OP was full of shit: a lot of people use Ogg -- exactly in the situation mozilla is interested in. The fact that they might not know they're using Ogg Vorbis is totally irrelevant.
What the game industry uses to encode music in games has no influence whatsoever on the habits of the general public in that area. Your post is pretty much orthogonal to the point of the GP, which is that Vorbis doesn't have the popularity required to make it a good choice to encode your music collection, unless you choose your mp3 player before you encode. From a limited set of choices, which may not have the looks you like, the features you want or the price you're willing to pay. And be ready to do the same thing in a few years, when you need to replace your music player.
It's a bit bigger than a Shuffle and a lot smaller than a Nano. It has a screen, like the Nano, but not a colour screen and it is just for menus and displays, not for watching videos. It is therefore somewhere between a Shuffle and a Nano. It is not "Shuffle sized".
Apple list the Shuffle at 15.6 grams and the Nano at 36.8 grams. Sansa list the Clip at 26.1 grams.
I am amazed that, at 10.5 grams extra, the Sansa Clip is apparently far too heavy for you to take running. You must be a truly sensitive individual.
I was so concerned about the lack of development of Vorbis I decided to write my own Vorbis codec from scratch. Well, mostly it was an academic exercise many years ago, but since then I've realised that it's a genuinely useful project. It validated the specification, and showed up many places where the design could be improved.
It still needs a lot more work, but it currently decodes all Vorbis streams correctly at reasonable speed. Well, it's about half the speed of the official codec, but I haven't concentrated much on speed and there's some really obvious places where there are large improvements to be had easily.
If anyone's interested, it's hosted on Google Code:
Om Codec
I guess neither the submitter or the editor that approved the story knows enough about Xiph and Ogg to know that they also support FLAC and Speex so donating to Xiph is in effect donating to these as well.
And also to Vorbis, Theora, Spiff and AO.
There really isn't 100k worth of work to do on the Ogg format, its just a container, one thats been rather well defined for a while. So considering Speex and FLAC are codecs supported in an Ogg container, and all 3 of them are managed by the same organization, I think its rather stupid to say 'no meantion of FLAC or Speex' just because the submitter doesn't know anything about Xiph.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Uhm, its a direct show filter, which means it will work in any windows application which supports the installed windows codecs, so by going to http://www.xiph.org/downloads/ and clicking the Ogg Codec's for Windows link you will have exactly what you are talking about.
And finally, Comparing Silverlight to Ogg is like comparing Flash to MP3, its a stupid comparison as they do almost entirely different things. I stress almost.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It's funny you mention Miles. It's the one audio library you can use that comes with a blanket MP3 license (I think they made a very early deal with Fraunhofer before a general per-game license fee was decided on). Pretty much any other audio library, such as FMOD or wwise you'll have to pay an additional licensing fee.
The biggest reason to use Vorbis is actually technical, not the licensing agreement. It's not that expensive to license mp3 use for a game title - just a few grand per title, which is pretty insignificant compared to total development expenses for AAA title nowadays (more critical for indy developers, of course). Vorbis has support for 6-channel audio, and it has sample-accurate containers, meaning you can easily chop it up, splice it, loop it, etc... MP3 is really only good for simple playback scenarios.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Finally, if it made a serious difference, we'd see Microsoft trying to buy their way into it.
"Why, $6 million dollars every week, Mr Wales! Are you sure you don't want the money?"
- Slower than .MP3 .MP3 .MP3
- Ridiculously high-overhead container format compared to
- High seek granularity compared to
Yep. Ogg's a "better format," I guess.
Aside from companies that insist on making their own custom chip sets (e.g. Apple), you'll have a hard time finding an ASIC that handles both MP3 and AAC but not Vorbis. There's a reason that second- and third-tier vendors like Samsung and Sansa support ogg vorbis, and it's not because they think that supporting that format will give them a bigger market share. It's because it's so cheap to do so that there's absolutely no reason not to.
Come on. Ford? They made cars called "Pinto", "Festiva", and "Probe".
We use countless words that would sound stupid if they were new to us. Ogg is no worse, and it does have the advantage of being accurately memorable (I can't tell you the number of ways I've seen people mangle "H264" and "AAC")
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Many people don't seem to know this, but Adobe actually added the Speex codec to the Flash 10 player, allowing it to be used as an alternative to the proprietary Nellymoser codec.
Considering the market share of the Flash player, I would say that's quite an endorsement. Too bad they did't include Vorbis support as well.
But at the end of the day, the one way to let these promising completely Free codecs gain more traction is by convincing an influential company to adopt, sponsor, and champion them. Dirac has the advantage of being both developed and used (albeit internally for now) by the BBC, which is quite the juggernaut in the media and broadcasting world. So high is BBC's influence, that they successfully proposed the intraframe-only variant of Dirac (named Dirac Pro) to be accepted by the SMPTE as an official codec with the designation VC-2.
Since two is higher than one, people will then automatically think "Hey, the number is higher, so VC-2 must be better than Microsoft's VC-1 codec". :) Hopefully, SMPTE will eventually also allow the fully-featured (not just intraframe-only) version of Dirac to be ratified as an extended part of that standard, perhaps under the name "VC-2 plus" or "VC-2 extended profile" or something.
We'll see how that goes. Although the new Thusnelda implementation will be improving the quality and performance of the Theora codec, I believe the more state-of-the-art Dirac codec really remains more promising and has much more room for further improvement, especially in the long term. I hope Mozilla will take Dirac video codec at least as seriously as Theora. Ideally, Firefox would be shipped with the following integrated codecs ready to be used with the video-tag: MPEG-1 (ubiquitous and all its patents seem to have expired), Theora, and Dirac. For audio, it should ship with PCM, Speex, Vorbis, and FLAC support.
No it's not, that was my point... until the mainstream average PC user knows what it is, how its used, and what benefits it may or may not have, it wont get mainstream adoption.
MP3 is popular because it was shoved in everyones face, there's no www.ogg.com, there's no Rio Ogg Player.
if Apple decided to make an iOgg or something, everyone would be using OGG a year later. But if Google, Microsoft, Facebook, WikiMedia, etc all decided to use OGG exclusively for their system/notice/sample sounds, it wouldnt make a difference, it would be "everywhere", used by millions everyday, but no one would be bitching that their "MP3" player doesnt play OGG, because it plays MP3 just fine regardless of its shortcshortcomings.
I'm pretty sure that Mozilla is interested in mainstream adoption, "free for all" not just a few large scale media companies that use it for the odd sound.
FedEx uses a special envelope when sending millions of packages a day, almost everyone has seen or touched one at one point, but you don't see normal people using them for their daily mail because it just doesn't fill a need, what they are currently using works well enough.
But I'm just babbling now.
Not sure I get the submitter's point about FLAC and speex, unless Mozilla has put some strings on the money (TFA doesn't exactly say) and told Xiph that they can only use these bucks for working on some specific codecs.
But, if that's true, then the focus on Theora still makes sense. Dirac may hold more promise long-term, but Theora is here and usable right now, even if its competitors technically beat it. Throwing money into improving the reference Theora encoder, knowing that if the project suddenly aborts (the money runs out or whatever) you still have a working product, isn't exactly stupid. It's just a bit more pragmatic than what FOSS people want (and expect, given Vorbis' asskickingness).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
...Just like PNG?
I remember when it was just a nutty outlier standard that hardly anyone ever heard of or supported. Web images were either .GIFs or .JPGs, or if you had tons of bandwidth and room, .BMPs, maybe .TIFs in some bizarre cases. "What's a .PNG?" they asked. "An image standard? Why would we need that? Patents? Ha! Good luck trying to oust the .JPG standard!"
Today, .PNG is supported by every major browser (although only eventually kicking and screaming by IE after Firefox used it as a valid claim of feature superiority), is unencumbered by patents, and with a full alpha channel instead of that screwy palette-based transparency crap that .GIFs stuck us with for years (and the .JPG doesn't support at all in any meaningful manner), it is actually a superior standard.
So please, keep on thinking that Flash and .MP3 is the be-all and end-all of standards, that nothing will ever supplant it. As for me, I've seen .OGG files already used extensively behind the scenes in various software so that developers don't have to pay nasty licensing fees, and I can easily imagine that a year or two or five down the road, open standards such as these will be just as prevalent and supported as predominant closed standards are today.
The most important question unasked
Cheers,
Monty
Xiph.Org
The Wikimedia Foundation does not allow MP3. When one of the biggest websites does not use MP3 but ogg, it makes a serious difference.
Wikipedia uses Cortado, a Java-based web applet, to provide Ogg support for users who don't have native support installed on their computer (read: almost everybody).
"Sir, what is this?"
"a mp5 player"
"...like the gun?"
"no, no"
"...you're under arrest"
Wow, that was strained and ugly.
It was strained an ugly because you didn't use a car analogy, silly!
MP3car and OGGcar both get you from A to B. OGGcar has more horsepower but a higher fuel consumption. The MP3car has better mileage AND a bigger fuel tank.
Since the actual constraint is the speed limit of the road, which both cars can easily maintain, then the MP3car wins on both economy and distance.
There, wasn't that better?
and yet, it costs nothing.
I agree with your post, just pointing out that this is the sad part. They don't pay *anything* back to the projects they leverage to get their millions made.
Personally I have been busy lately with a project to archive a large collection of lewd folk songs about hedgehogs. No other format would do.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Yeah, that was very bad. Perhaps I can help clarify why. In restaurants and eating, you want diversity. You don't want to eat the same thing every day. It's fantastic that some foods are "incompatible" and weird. With format standards, you don't really want diversity. You want uniformity. You want it to do exactly the same thing every time.
Dining is about taste and personal preference. Standards, not so much.
... and then they built the supercollider.
interesting, lots of mp3 players, but no ogg players in the latest BestBuy flyer.
ok, you can mod me "troll" now
..."I'll just buy a Samsung which are well priced and specced and play Ogg." Indeed! I've had my Samsung YP-U2R (catchy huh?) a couple of years now and it still looks the business! I rip my CD's onto my PC as Ogg files because they really do sound better than MP3 (better bass I think), but not many MP3 players will play Ogg. I think this is ultimately, why the Ogg format isn't catching on. Surely the open-source Ogg codecs are free for MP3 player manufactures to incorporate into their products, so why don't they? It's not going to cost them anything is it?
FTA:
"Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software."
Nice! Thank you mozilla.
Overall this is good, as long as they can afford it. I would love it if firefox users could use our collective weight to force(?) web sites to just stream the damn video to us, rather than using whatever lame flash interface they have set up.
Question for someone more knowledgeable: Since vorbis is inherently VBR, does that pose any problems for internet streaming?
Other than that, no word about flac makes me a sad panda. Well, maybe directly in the browser isn't the right place for flac. But I keep thinking we're going to wake up one day and all music will go straight from microphone to ~192kbps before even leaving the studio. And we'll look around wondering what happened.
LOL, apparently "plugin", "mozilla", and "firefox" are spelling errors.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
I've been looking for some good utility to convert FLACs to MP3 - thanks!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most media compression schemes exploit how our brain interprets light, motion and sound. Given this, if you played a compressed video to a bird or snake, what would they see? Would their experience of it be anything like ours?
As we switch to digital TV, we will soon be broadcasting MPEG2 streams into space. In a million years, maybe an intelligent alien life form will tune into this MPEG2 stream. Given their brains must have evolved in a different way, would what they see on their screen be interpreted the same way? Likewise, if we intercepted their compressed video stream it would be optimized for how their brain deals with audio and video. Would we be able to view it in a way our brains could properly decode?
Can someone explain why we need 40mb songs? Why not just use wav files? FLAC has got to be the most useless fileformat... next to pdf but thats probably only because adobe reader is garbage. Ah well atleast .oggs are pro
I hope this will help project
JMule user, enjoy it : http://www.jmule.org
Remember what you did yesterday? In how much detail?
Lossy is the future.
Look at the music recordings. Recording engineers mix to ensure the best use of the medium it will be stored on.
RIAA equalisation wasn't driven by musicians saying what they want. It was engineers saying what they'd standardise on. Then *recording* engineers come along and mix the recording of the artist to hide the flaws and accentuate the benefits of the RIAA curve on the music to make the music as close to what the artist wants as possible.
It was the same with CD. The format was decided. And original recordings on CD were CRAP because the engineers used the same mixing processes as they used for RIAA curves. But the CD has a completely different set of plus and minus points.
E.g. Timbre and shape are harder to get right in the digital realm but you have a massivly greater dynamic range.
IIRC the re-record of the White Label beatles album was the first one where the recording engineers designed the mixing to accentuate the benefits of CD.
And CDs were then better than LP.
Now, since the recording labels demand the engineers make it sound louder so it sells in a noisy shop, the dynamic range is being thrown away.
But that's not going to be fixed by the recording engineer nor by the engineers designing the compression format.
But you have it completely the wrong way around. The compression format is made up from the best general case from an engineering point of view.
Then the recording engineers exploit the plusses and hide the negatives of the decision.
Plus a cut for profit.
What? You think that they'll soak up the cost of licensing in reduced profit???