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."

Comments

Re:Mozilla and Open Standards

[BitZtream]

Hate to break it to you, but no one cares about the audio and video on Wikipedia. People aren't going to Wikipedia to watch videos, they go to pornhub and youtube for that, which I feel the need to point out, don't use OGG, and aren't going to any time soon, they have no reason to, what they have works perfectly acceptable and even though they 'pay licensing costs' when they purchase server software, the cost of that license is practically unmeasurable to them on the scale they work, so switching to an unsupported format because it'll save them a millionth of a cent per viewer would be ... well, retarded at best.

I personally have never heard any audio or seen any video on Wikipedia, so their usage of it, isn't enough to really mean dick to anyone.

Considering Wikipedia's credibility is practically nil to anyone with half a clue, its not like its achieved the level of acceptance required to make it a reason that people will be bitching at MS to add support for OGG. And even if the entire world supported it, they probably still wouldn't, and would require you to find a plugin, just like the do for the other standards that are orders of magnitude more common than OGG. (QuickTime, Flash, SVG).

They added PNG because they could VERY easily grab the source code and include it in the OS at practically no cost, it shouldn't have taken more than a day to integrate libpng into IE at most, maybe two if the guy was a little slow that day.

Adding native OGG support is simple enough and probably wouldn't take much longer, the licenses (BSD) are good for it, but to the average person theres really no reason why they would want it. With PNG there was noticable improvements over GIF (full color support, not an 8bit palatte and real translucency/transparency support), Vorbis not so much ( noticable improvement in quality if you look for it as well as a noticable increase in CPU workload), Theora, no improvement over anything out there I've seen yet unless perhaps you like using your CPU as a heater so the increased load from it keeps your basement warm.

A) The quality difference in Vorbis isn't noticable to almost anyone on a PC (Queue the: I CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE bullshitters now please) or portable player considering the quality of most PC speakers and headphones used on these devices. Sure there are some audiophiles that probably have a setup good enough to notice the difference, but those 8 people use lossless audio anyway.
B) You can just download the codecs with a neat little Windows installer from xiph.org and you get full support in any application written properly anyway.
C) Outside of the OSS community, no one knows what OGG is. They know: MP3 and Video (some may know mpeg, but those are rare). They really don't even know what a MP3 is, to most what Apple sells on iTunes are MP3s even though AAC files or whatever they use.

So other than: 'OMG ITS OSS IT MUST FUCKING ROCK THE WORLD' why would anyone (MS or otherwise) else care? They don't, which is why no one knows what it is outside of the OSS community.

Wake up and smell the coffee people, OSS doesn't mean its automatically good or of practical value over anything else that already exists. While as a developer I appreciate BSD licensed libraries such as these and I appreciate the effort put into such projects, I really don't appreciate the random new format invented to compete with existing formats JUST because the new format is free. In 20 years if all we have is free standard formats, I'll be glad I'm sure, during the transition period all it means is more work for no actual gain. I still have to support the 'standard' used by everyone else, and if I want to keep up with the times, I have to add support for another format that does exactly the same thing as the 6 others I'm already supporting.

Finally, since you can just download and install the codec anyway, Microsoft has no reason to be in a hurry to support it or bundle it. If they were going to, they'd also be bundling new versions of the Flash player with Windows, which in case you haven't noticed, they don't.

Don't hold your breath expecting MS to care about Wikipedia or OGG any time soon.