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Ogg Format Accusations Refuted
SergeyKurdakov sends in a followup to our discussion a couple of months ago on purported shortcomings to the Ogg format. The inventor of the format, Monty "xiphmont" Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation, now refutes those objections in detail, with the introduction: "Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact." The refutation has another advantage besides authoritativeness: it's far better written than the attack.
The refutation has another advantage besides authoritativeness: it's far better written than the attack.
coughcoughADHOMINEM
If you're going to make commentary about an argument, try not to use a logical fallacy when doing so...
Please help metamoderate.
Certainly better written than Rullgard's hatchet-job. Maybe I'm just used to reading technical documentation (RFCs and the like), but I really dislike reading the flippant opinions of some hack with an axe to grind. Much prefer reading the technicalities of the topic and making up my own mind.
Funny, I thought the goal was to get away from a patent encumbered format. Does Ogg work? Is it reasonably close to MP3/4? I believe the answer is yes to both. Now is Ogg as efficient as MP3/4, I cannot really comment because I am not that technically versed. If a standard HTML5 Video is adopted, it should and must be patent unencumbered. Rather than this nitpciking, I would love to see that same energy poured into improving Ogg. Like any design, Ogg can be improved upon to reach the same robustness of MP3/4.
And more importantly, they're wrong, in the eyes of its developer.
It's a cogent flame of his critics, but it also exposes what are plainly design differences-- and his critic's non-nuanced eye. You have to appreciate someone that can split hairs so finely when taking a set of arguments apart. I like thinkers.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I want to prepend my ignorance in this area, however one thing that occrs to me in your complaint is that isnt this really how the OSI model works? The higher level (container) has the info it needs to pass its payload along to the next level. http, being a payload in the data of IP, and so on. Now I cannot speak to if this makes sense in the contact of media storage, but parsing deep into the media itself would seem to be out of scope of a container, and then end up being a crutch that could break later for yet unimagined content.
From the article:
When MPEG-1 started it closely followed H.261. H.261 was very well written. Back in 1994 when Xiph started, MPEG-1 had already been going 6 years.
Ogg is full of strange fields and difficult to read structures. The author of the criticism is right to question it, especially when Ogg used similar fields but changed the names. There was never any need to change terminologies. H.261 and MPEG-1 were well written standards but not freely available and included patented technologies. The "not freely available" means that you have to buy it, not that it's secret.
If Xiph wanted to produce a free standard for video coding they could easily have adopted the same terminologies and similar structures, defining their own versions of them and recommending unpatented technologies. Instead they chose their weird terminology and rushed to come out with something different without spending the time to work out how difficult it would be for users to implement and what quality it would give. H.261 and MPEG were backed up by masses of research by companies and universities of which much was freely available in journals and conference proceedings.
The idea that "MPEG was hardly dominant" is the thought of someone who either didn't do his homework at the time or a revisionist. VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties, or doesn't that count ?
From the summary:
I wish it had been. If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them. Don't pick apart the text, all of it, sentence by sentence. Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.
He didn't say it was good, he explained why it is good.
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Just how much money is MPEG-LA making on their patent pool? How much are they spending on bad mouthing OGG to preserve/increase their income?
Treat any criticism of proprietary product competitors with a very large grain of salt.
Particularly against free competitors since it's legally safer as they often don't have the legal resources to fight half-truths and innuendo.
Good to see Monty's refutation.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
I wouldn't assume because the OSI model works that way means its the right model for a video container format.
And, given the plethora of systems out there that have had to add functionality to introspect higher layers while routing lower layers, I wouldn't even assume the OSI model is actually the right one for networking, either.
It's a different kind of flaw, though. Rullgard was arguing that Ogg is inherently technically flawed. Arguing that it's technically fine but unusable due to a lack of documentation is a different argument.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Where, exactly, is the boundary line between a file format and its documentation/specs?
$ make available
ID and LENGTH is not a "container" by any definition that I have ever heard of or used in practice.
What you are describing is a common ordinary linked list.
None of the containers that I am aware of require you to understand the video data in order to play the audio data, so what the heck are you actually getting on about? That "containers" should be ordinary linked lists?
In reality, thats not fit for purpose. That media file contains at least two stream, and while each stream can be treatable as independent, they can also be treatable as semi-dependent. There exists information that is shared between streams. For example, metadata.
If I am not required to decode the video stream, then you can't put the shared metadata in the video stream. If I am not required to decode the audio stream, then you can't put the shared metadata in the audio stream. So what then?
And thus, the media container is born. Linked lists just don't cut it. These formats are more than linked lists for a real (and I gave only one of them) reason.
"His name was James Damore."
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode?
Right, so much for Ogg.
This kind of answer, which amounts to "You shouldn't want to do that", is an absolutely certain indicator of a product that doesn't solve the problem that poeople actually have and never will, because when the inadequacies of the solution are pointed out, users are told they should have a different problem.
Every time I have ever been told by anyone anything like that it has been a sure indication that they have simply failed to understand the domain I am working in.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.