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

More details on grants

[alain94040]

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

"Better" is relative...

[Manip]

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.

Re:"Better" is relative...

[Chabo]

I've been introducing my friends to Oggs whenever possible.

My biggest thing about them is that historically MP3s have had terrible support for seamless transitions between tracks ("gapless playback"), and I listen to tons of music that relies on not being able to hear those transitions: Pink Floyd, Dream Theater, movie soundtracks, classical music...

In order to have gapless support with MP3s, you need to use LAME to encode them, then use a LAME-aware decoder that supports LAME's gapless playback headers, like foobar2000 or Rockbox. But then if you play those in a non-LAME-aware decoder, like most non-Rockbox portable players, then you get a gap. The only way around this is LAME's (rather fragile) gapless switch, which extends the packets to end the song on a packet boundary.

Meanwhile, Oggs have no packet restrictions, so they inherently support gapless playback with no extra tricks.

Shameless plug (since not everyone has sigs enabled): I wrote FlacSquisher, a program to convert FLACs to Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format. Then I can rip my CDs to FLAC for home-listening use, then encode them en masse to Oggs for portable use. Try it out! :)

Re:I thought Ogg was dead

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

You thought wrong.

Re:Mozilla and Open Standards

[bcrowell]

When Mozilla backed PNG, many websites started replacing their old patent-encumbered GIFs with PNGs, and even IE started to support PNG format.

I think it was a good, positive thing that an alternative to GIF was created and widely implemented. However, let's be realistic about what it accomplished. As a user, there was never a viable option to run a browser without GIF support; if even one site you visit still uses GIFs, then you need a browser with a GIF decoder built in. As a web developer, the situation wasn't all that different. Say you're a professional web developer, and you're hired to do a site that has to work in IE x.y+ and Firefox z.w+. Well, you look at whether the browsers you're required to support will support PNG at all, and you also look at whether they support all PNG features properly, and whether you need the features that aren't supported properly in IE. Yes, you might be able to do the job without having a patent-encumbered LZW encoder. So there was a time when PNG was completely nonviable because of complete lack of browser support, possibly followed by a certain time when you might be able to get away with not having a patent-encumbered algorithm on your web development machine, and now the present period when the LZW patents have expired. That middle period was probably not just short for most professional web developers, it was probably nonexistent.

The basic problem was that there only had to some tiny number of cases where PNG wouldn't work, and that was enough to make anyone running a commercial web site demand that the site be designed so that it would work in a browser that supported GIF.

Similar issue with audio codecs. I recently digitized my LP collection, and also transferred my CDs to my computer so I could stop having piles of CDs around my living room. I decided to encode everything in a lossy format, because I wanted my backups to be a reasonable size, and I personally can't hear the difference between mp3/ogg levels of lossiness and CD quality. I was all fired up to use ogg, until I started confronting the realities. I have a portable mp3 player that works with mp3 but not with ogg. That simple fact was enough to make me decide on using mp3. It doesn't matter that my linux box supports ogg, and my network appliance I use as a music server also supports ogg. All it takes is one place where support is lacking, and I bite the bullet and go with the non-free format. And just as the LZW patent has already expired, the patents relating to mp3 are also starting to expire.

I'm glad that both png and ogg were created, but I don't think we should overestimate what they accomplished during the limited time when they were alternatives to patent-encumbered formats.

Re:Network effects keep Ogg out

[RiotingPacifist]

Don't forget games, iff you can ship the decoder with your software, you might aswell go ogg because vorbis has a slightly better file size at reasonable encoding and there are no downsides.

Re:Go ahead - throw your money away

[horza]

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.

Re:I thought Ogg was dead

[squiggleslash]

MP3 is transparent for most people at higher bitrates

The funny thing is that at higher bitrates, MP2 is generally considered higher quality than MP3. And MP2 is backward/forward compatible with MP3 - that is, an MP2 will play on all MP3 players (MP3 ("MPEG Audio Layer 3") is, as the name implies, MP2 with an extra layer grafted on so that lower bitrate audio will sound decent), and oddly enough an MP2 player will play an MP3 but it'll sound like crap.

Why is this funny?

Well, MP2 is essentially patent free. Fraunhoffer has indicated they have no desire to enforce any patents they own against MP2 implementations.

Couple that with the enormous capacity increases you're seeing in regular MP3 players, and there's not much reason to go for Ogg anymore. Encode your stuff as 192kbps MP2, and it's future proof, playable on free players, playable on virtually every portable player, and higher quality than MP3 at the same bitrate. Go figure.