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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."
MP3 players now mostly use hardware decoders, because they are much cheaper and energy-efficient than CPU decoding.
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality
First: <pedantic>Ogg is the container format, like QuickTime or AVI. Vorbis is the audio codec being compared to MP3. You could, if you wanted to, put MP3 bits into an Ogg container; I guess this would be "Ogg MP3". </pedantic>.
Vorbis gives you better quality per bit than MP3. That means you can have higher quality in the same number of bits, or similar quality in fewer bits. Given that most of us aren't using modems anymore, perhaps this is only a weak selling point for Vorbis. It's still nice for small portable music players, though.
but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
As I understand it, the overhead for Vorbis isn't really that bad. The chief sticking point is that the little portable players use DSP chips, and the DSP chip vendors have excellent support for MP3 and no support for Vorbis. This means that when a project like Rockbox adds Vorbis support to a portable player, often they use the main CPU instead of the DSP chip, and that means a drastically worse power drain.
A sticking point from the past was that Vorbis was written to use floating-point math in the decoder. The Vorbis folks made an integer-math-only decoder called Tremor, which answers that point.
For a desktop computer, you would never notice the difference between a good Vorbis decoder and a good MP3 decoder.
I think the main reason for the lack of Vorbis takeup is inertia. Everyone has MP3s, so the players all support MP3s. Since the players support MP3s, only geeks like me bother with Vorbis, so the player companies don't feel motivated to support anything but MP3. I used to hope for Vorbis support everywhere, but now MP3 is just a few years away from its patents expiring, so it's going to be MP3 for the near to middle term.
I own a couple of Sansa players that can play Ogg Vorbis. They have excellent battery life, despite being tiny little things. They stand as examples that there is no inherent technical reason why Vorbis cannot work on small portable players. By the way, if you are a geek, you should consider one of these before you buy an iPod Shuffle; more features for less money, and it works as a USB storage device so it works perfectly well on Linux.
http://www.sansa.com/players/sansa_clip/tech
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
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.
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.
Since it looks like MP3 may expire in Dec 2012 (since according to Wiki the later patents are questionable) they really don't have long to succeed. I personally don't see anything defeating MP3. There are just too many devices out there that play MP3 that won't play formats like OGG and FLAC. Now in video I could see the possibility of another format taking over, although .avi is still very popular as a container. Perhaps now that DivX is going with .mkv that we will see it end up replacing .avi. But in audio for most folks MP3 is "good enough" and plays with everything they own so I don't really foresee it going away. I think you are right that once the MP3 patents expire that like FLAC it will have a niche but nothing more.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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