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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
"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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Lossless still uses too much disk space. You can get "transparent" results in double-blind tests with LAME -V0 -V1 -V2 or even -V3. In the rare exceptions where you can hear a difference, you could encode with CBR 320, or even lossless at that point. I've never encountered this case in my own collection, but have heard the samples with the problems.
For me, lossless isn't worth using with it's ~800kbps bitrates... I can fit 3 or 4 times the music on the same player using mp3 and I can't hear the difference.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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
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
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.
I agree you need an understand of how the human body/mind perceives sight and sound to work on perceptual encoding schemes.
However, I disagree that you need to understand "the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production". You need those things to create certain audio/video content. You don't need them to engineer what is essentially a transmission medium.
The designers of FM radio didn't need to be versed in music theory or be able to compare and contrast the styles of Beethoven and Chopin. Neither do the developers of video codecs need to appreciate the finer points of storytelling. Basically, you don't need to know how the signal was produced, or whether the signal is fine art, you just need to know how to efficiently represent the signal in a way that humans can't notice the difference from the original source.
To be sure, the knowledge required is cross-disciplinary. Designing a video codec at a minimum will use knowledge from signal processing, computer programming, biology, etc. But that doesn't mean you need a small army, just the right textbooks and research papers.
Where you DO need folks like broadcasters and content creators is when you are trying to put your codec into an application for their use. But that application first requires that you have a working technology under the hood.
Why do we care that the MP3 has patents and all that? What does it do?
Makes it impossible to support them directly in any open source software, for one thing -- Firefox included.
Yes, you can write a generic API, then write third party plugins that supply them, and distribute those plugins in countries which don't honor US patents, and download them illegally in the US. But then you will have no legal download of Firefox for the Windows users who just want to download it and play.
Also, I was developing a music website. It was not an ideological one, or at least, not software-wise -- though I fought it, we eventually ended up going to an all-Flash widget to play the songs. But we would have had to pay outrageous fees to re-encode all the music in MP3, and we'd suddenly have to think about licensing, whereas with other codecs, we can just fire up as many EC2 instances as we want.
Also, MP3 sound quality sucks compared to just about everything else. Since the average customer still thinks in terms of "mp3 player", moving to wma or aac is just as big a leap for them, so why not vorbis or flac instead?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
The best I can give you is hear-say -- I know someone who worked at our community radio station, and they did listening tests. MP3 is definitely the worst of current-gen codecs -- mostly because it's not a current-gen codec, it's a last-gen codec that people can't seem to let go.
So, Vorbis definitely sounds better, at the same bitrate.
I can't speak to CPU. At the time it was developed, it used a lot of CPU -- the name "ogg" came from the brute-force techniques that were used, which pushed that 486 hardware to the limit.
Did I mention, 486 hardware?
Oh, by the way: You're thinking Vorbis, not Ogg. Ogg is a container format. You could just as easily put an mp3 stream in there, or put a vorbis stream in an mkv.
And the donation was not just Ogg, but also Vorbis, Theora (video), and others.
I would say, if ogg became as successful as png, I'd be happy. Right now, png is successful enough that I can use it in a website, and every browser will support it. Even if plenty of people still use gif, or even jpeg inappropriately (for images that compress well). And then you have the brand-new applications -- HD-DVD seemed to prefer PNG images for the menus.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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?
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?