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

Mozilla and Open Standards

[mandelbr0t]

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!

Re:"Better" is relative...

[pizzach]

I agree with you. But AAC support is going up. It should be becoming less of an issue and when popular formats start changing hands, it's the perfect time for a new disruptive format to come in.

Ogg's biggest problems is that people don't know it exists. Not that it is a bad or good format/container.

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:More details on grants

[Red Flayer]

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

This subliminal message?

Mode vorpar doom dares, no reboot

I don't get it. Please explain.

Network effects keep Ogg out

[pieterh]

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.

Re:"Better" is relative...

[steveha]

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

Re:I thought Ogg was dead

[AKAImBatman]

I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur.

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.