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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
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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.
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!
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Ogg will live as long as the MPEG patents live. If Ogg can succeed before the MPEG patents are done, then it will be in the same position PNG is in now: just another format people can choose, with some minor technical advantages.
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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.
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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.
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The hardware support is impressive too. Everything from Sansa and Neuros to iRiver and Cowon support both the vorbis and flac codecs. The only major missing player is Apple. Considering over half of my collection is ripped or downloaded in these formats, that is why Apple is not received a dime from me.
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.
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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.
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
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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Not really. Most posters manage to miss the purpose of Mozilla's funding. This deals directly with an issue in the HTML5 specs. Specifically, the fact that HTML5 does not have a default codec for audio/video. It used to be Ogg Vorbis/Theora, but that got canned when Apple claimed they couldn't support it in Quicktime without opening themselves to possible patent lawsuits. To which Mozilla countered that they couldn't support Apple's default of MPEG4 due to licensing issues.
The end result of the debates (and *cough*arguments*cough*) is that support for Ogg was removed from the spec. As of right now, WebKit will support Quicktime formats (+user installed Ogg plugins) while Mozilla will support Ogg. What Mozilla is attempting to accomplish with this grant is to propel forward the use of Ogg in public places like Wikipedia. If they can gain enough of a market presence, they probably figure they can make Ogg the defacto standard for HTML5 audio/video. Much in the way MP3 became the defacto standard for music by being positioned in the market at the right time and place.
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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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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.
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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.
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Since it looks like MP3 may expire in Dec 2012
If the prophecies hold true, my friend, we will all be expiring...