Nah, I just believe that there are limits on reasonable behavior. Someday I hope to [modestly] cash in on Ogg along with everyone else... but only once it's established and well defended against IP terrorism. Don't read me to be a total angel-- that's Linus's position;-)
As for a donations page, well, we were actually in denial for a long time that folks would actually be asking to donate money. We were wrong. We've seen the error of our ways, wholeheartedly apologize, and are doing the paperwork (and setting up the means) by which we can accept donations from generous supporters such as yourself.
As an individual, sure, you have relatively little to worry about. Except that all the really *fun* artists and companies will spend more time worrying about the bottom line than getting music to you to enjoy.
Oh and don't forget about all the restrictions on when you can use your music. SDMI may yet require you to listen on only a single 'approved' player. Buy a copy for your desktop, another for your portable, another for the backup disc... SDMI and FhG are on friendly terms.
We're making Vorbis for everybody, and that includes all the companies and artists, big and small. The small fry (who can't afford mp3) have the most to gain. The big fry are happy too because this whacks a chunk of money right out of expenses. It levels the technological playing field and makes it easier for everyone to make money at the same time it keeps the technology free (and interoperable: easy to use)
Mmmm. Makes me just want to go lie down in a peaceful, sunny field of flowers (and code, of course).
Oh, erm, actually I was only talking to the folks that seemed ready to flee if MPEG said "boo". Sort of a "stop running, good, now breathe deeply, yes, good" in calm soothing tones.
Now if you're pissed and feel like getting a few hundred developers to march on Thomson headquarters with flaming torches (maybe we could get the Large Hot Pipe Organ to play) to make our opinions known (loudly, spectacularly, but peacefully), I'll volunteer right now for propane torch duty so long as someone volunteers crash space for the sleepover!
It's happening. Don't forget it took WMA a year and a half to make it into its first handheld. We're already running under Dadio, the iObjects handheld operating system software licensed by handheld manufacturers based on ARM (eg, Cirrus Maverick). And we haven't even had an official 1.0 release.
My Iomega HipZip plays.oggs, but I'm not allowed to give out that firmware version yet. For those of you who have the HipZip, had you wondered why the xiph.org twirlfish logo was in the 'about player' menu?:-)
Actually we are trying to set things up such that xiph.org is the only easy target in any litigation that might come Vorbis's way. The idea, obviously, is to mimimize potential liability of any industry adoptees--- not because it's strictly necessary, but because the industry is more likely to adopt if we can give them additional armor-plated warm fuzzies.
I was never a VQF developer. One of my professors in Japan, Sadoaki Furui, is head of NTT Human Interfaces lab, which developed the original VQF, then called TwinVQ. The fact that we knew each other was the limit of the overlap (and we met exactly because we both worked in compression).
Any technical commonality (there is some) is coincidental. Both TwinVQ and Vorbis draw more from speech encoding technology than mp3 does.
(Incidentally, VQF has noise problems because of the way the lossy/nonuniform vector quantization interleaves MDCT scalars. Vorbis works differently).
Vorbis was never a 'limited hack of VQF'. Please, *do* go inspect the original CVS snapshots as well as the previous generations of Xiph.org codecs, Squish, '95' and Stormbringer, all of which predate TwinVQ.
But, eh, I just fell for arguing eith a fool. Now I feel all dirty.
Don't attack Eric for telling what he sees to be the truth. That's his job.
Behind the scenes, he's a friend of the Ogg project and has been for some time. He's doing his job by calling it how he sees it, and we don't ask him to spin the facts toward our favor. He also doesn't have control over which quote a reporter will choose.
Linde said what he said only because it was an opportunity for some free FUD. Between the lines, it says, "we're worried/scared, they're on our radar, and we need to make some noise. Words are cheaper than lawyers."
Big surprise.
If Slashdotters didn't expect that already, well, shame on you. Sudden worried speculation about Fraunhofer's and Thomson's 'newly ominous tone' is just the snowball they'd like to start (while pressing full-steam ahead with the new webcast and download licensing). I'd be annoyed if they managed to start it with a single public sentence (we've known they didn't like us for quite a while in private). Let's not be a herd of sheep being maneuvered into the chute.
Thomson and FhG both have a reputation of a loud bark, but tend to pursue relatively little litigation in practice and they'll have to work hard to find basis against Xiphophorus. When we did our patent review, we focused on the FhG/Thomson MPEG patents. Our counsel advises us we don't infringe, what we knew already.
In other words, nothing's changed from yesterday except that Linde has decided to bluff before the call.
Stop using top to measure light duty application CPU usage; it's not very accurate (easily off by more than 15% due to undersampling problems).
The reference decoder (in beta 3, due tomorrow) is currently about half the speed of the fastest mp3 decoder we've benched against (and equal to a few), so we're not that far behind after only spending about two days on optimization.
As for hardware, *I* own a Vorbis handheld player (Iomega HipZip:-)... and I can't wait until the firmware version with Vorbis support is finally marked off as 'ready for release to public'.
I have to get back to the beta 3 release. See y'all later...
Your voice observations are correct; mp3 has the same problem at comparable bitrates (compare ogg/mp3 in mono to see). Voice contains alot of high-frequency, highly correlated 'noise', but it's pulsed (and this is why all cutting edge voice codes are time-based and pulse/noise excited). mp3 has the same problems, but the extra boost of mid/side stereo is just enough to mask it (mp3 is actually starving the side channel to give you effectively a single 128kbps mono for voice)
This voice problem (and pulsed noise artifacts in general) the last artifact we're actively working on. That along with channel coupling coming soon in Ogg should be enough eliminate the problem. We have the problem about half-licked in beta 2, but not completely eliminated at 128kbps; at 160 and above, there are enough extra bits to just snow the sample with extra resolution until the problem disappears.
Right now, there's a comment header that allows text labels like 'TITLE', 'ARTIST', etc. A description of this header is in the CVS source int he doc/ directory.
A metadata stream type is in progress; see the vorbis and vorbis-dev mailing list archives at xiph.org to see ongoing and past discussion.
A few people either missed points I made in passing (as I don't believe in or ) or asked made decent points the interview didn't touch. I want to catch a few of them now.
First, Beta 2 is not out yet!. It'll be on www.vorbis.org and www.vorbis.com in inch high letters when it is:-) We're still shooting for releasing tomorrow.
"No one will switch to Ogg Vorbis because mp3 is dominant"
Consumers are not going to switch, the industry is. Both small and large industry players are going to try to avoid mp3 because of the licensing. For a small artist, $15,000 is alot of money. For the big companies, a flat percentage/per track fee is a huge chunk of cash. I stand to save my sponsor, iCast, around eight figures next year and they're not even one of the industry 'heavyweights' (yet;-)
...and when the industry switches, so will the consumer.
Now, the Slashdot crowd is not the typical herd of consumer sheep, but we're also a drop in the consumer bucket (we have more weight as techies than marketing segments). Ogg Vorbis will achieve market penetration top down because it saves everyone a ton of money and frees business plans from a large, uncontrollable external influence And if *companies* will use Vorbis to eliminate being yanked around (who says mp3 prices aren't going to go up? Remember, FhG reserves the right to set licensing case-by-case; MusicMatch gave away around 20% of their company for a free encoder license), the Right Thing for individuals is even more clear.
"Ogg Vorbis: Don't sell your Soul (or your equity)"
"There's been no real reason to think that MP3 will be "controlled" by the dark forces of the RIAA. MP3 is VHS, Ogg is Beta (a bit better - but is it worth the switch?)"
Actually, this is backwards. Beta died exactly because Sony strangled the format with licensing in order to keep complete control of it. VHS won because of relatively open licensing.
"I compared LAME 3.84 to Ogg Vorbis and LAME always sounded better."
First off, you're probably comparing beta 1; there were several analysis bugs that are fixed in CVS and beta 2.
Secondly, I mentioned although I did not emphasize, that Ogg Vorbis does not currently have channel coupling. If you're comparing Ogg Vorbis to LAME, you're comparing an essentially 'bundled mono' compression [today] to mid/side stereo in mp3. If you tell lame to compress two mono channels (like *current* Ogg Vorbis is), you'll see that you need to hike LAME up to about 192-225kbps to compare to Vorbis 128kbps in non-mid/side stereo. The fact that Vorbis (l/r stereo) still often beats LAME (m/s stereo) is astounding.
Yeah, it's not fair to say 'we're better than mp3 if you cripple mp3'. The point is that this is the next feature we're implementing and at that point, our bitrate, for a given stereo quality, will drop by about 40% just like in mp3. From Segher, a hardcore mp3 hacker and friend:
You say m/s stereo reduces the needed bitrate in mp3 by 30-50 kbps.
My experience shows me that a 224kbps stereo is about equal to a
128kbps m/s-stereo for most material (i.e., material for which m/s is
beneficial). That is about 100kbps.
(I was being conservative with 30-50kbps)
"There is no dark conspiracy between the RIAA and MPEG"
You're right. There's no secret conspiracy. It's all very out in the open. MPEG (FhG especially) is fundamental in developing SDMI, and RIAA-mandated SDMI is an integral part of AAC/MPEG4.
Courtney Love and others go off on this particular rant much better than I do, so I'll let it go at that;-)
"Not all companies are scum and many have acted in technological/public interests."
Correct, but that is not the case here.
MPEG is not non-commercial (why do people thing they are?). It is an industry standards consortium. The aim of the RIAA and MPEG is to *make money* and maintain the necessary control to do so. That does not mean that they will act abusively, however the chances of them doing so are greater without any moderating agent.
Who here remembers the old phone company joke [back when AT&T had a monopoly in the US]: "We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company."? Extrapolate and roleplay accordingly. Why do people get up in arms about Echelon controlling/monitoring email when it's perfectly OK for MPEG/RIAA/SDMI to do the same thing?
"Decode takes up about twice the CPU of mp3"
Also true for now. Vorbis decode is *not* more complex than mp3, I'm simply a better engineer than I am an optimizer. Decode is bound on the iMDCT and iDRFT transforms I wrote (couldn't find any open source for them at the time) and they're not particularly speedy. Segher, Takehiro from GOGO/LAME and others are looking at making my solid but slow code a little less station-wagon-like:-)
(BTW, if you're using top to see CPU usage, you're suffering from undersampling inaccuracy. At a minimum, compare mp3 decoders to vorbis decoders using 'time' not 'top';-)
"How will you defend against patents? Why should I believe this 'patent free' claim?"
IP patents are slowly turning into "watch the USPTO go clinically insane", so there are no guarantees. However, iCAST is footing the bill for an independent patent review of Ogg Vorbis. I'm probably not allowed to make an official statement at this time, but I will say (whether I should or not;-) That the patent attourneys involved do not believe there are any plausible infringement claims possible against Vorbis.
We'll have an official statement eventually, but the Wheels of Justice are already grinding much faster than the lawyers involved are used to;-)
I will also say I've been pleasantly surprised at how technically sharp the lawyers we're working with are.
People keep asking, so I'll just post it. From the name page:
The Ogg project began with a few-weekend-attempt at a simple audio compression package as part of a larger project in 1993. At the time, the software was called 'Squish'. The project and the general problem of music compression became a personal fascination, and Squish took on a life of its own far beyond the proportions of the original digital music studio project of which it was to be part.
A few months after the first Squish webpage, I received a polite but firm letter informing me that Squish is a registered trademark (for a mail transport system). Mike Whitson, a contributor to the cause in the early days, suggested the name 'OggSquish' as a replacement.
An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:
3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."
At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.
These days, Ogg is a larger multimedia project that does not only concern compression; Squish became the name of one of the Ogg codecs. For that reason, we usually just refer to it as Ogg when there's no Netrek context nearby. The Ogg project has nothing to do with the common surname 'Ogg'. Nor is it named after 'Nanny Ogg' from the Terry Pratchett book _Wyrd Sisters_.
The 'Thor-and-the-Snake' logo is drawn somewhat from Norse mythology; the real symbolism is the sine-curve shape of the snake. Thor is hefting Mjollnir about to compress the periodic signal Jörmungandr... See, it all makes sense.
Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.
This is a very good thing, but note that it is not "free of IP restrictions." GPL and LGPL both make restrictions on redistribution, and rely on copyright laws to enforce those resatrictions. To be sure, the restrictions are intended to advance a generally admirable agenda, but the only way to truly release something without any IP restrictions is to release it into the public domain.
You need to distinguish between the spec and the software we wrote that implements the spec. The spec is free of IP restrictions. Go use it. For anything. Make your own software and never look back.
Our software implementation is LGPL (for the libs) and GPL (for the utils). That's just *our* Ogg software.
Incidently, that page also has an explanation of their logo. That's Thor apparently, not Jesus or a picture of RMS from back when he was Mr. Universe...
I love it! People have said before that the logo 'looked like Jesus spanking a snake with a sparkler" (*so* much detail gets lost in the tiny logo), but no one had ever thought it was RMS. I can live with that particular misidentification:-)
Jack Moffitt is overseeing Ogg's production and implementation within iCast. He's one of those truly rare breed of geek; he not only has a technical whip (and knows how to use it), he enjoys talking to people, drumming up support, evangelizing and remembering all the names at a meeting.
Ogg got written because of me... but Ogg is getting the attention it deserves because of Jack.
Converting from mp3 to Ogg is going to make a pretty nasty file actually. Not only is a bunch of quality going to be gone.... but Ogg is going to spend losts of bits trying to encode mp3's artifacts!:-)
You're not the first to 'call' on this issue:-) And you definately should.
The legal review of Ogg and Vorbis patent status is one of the things iCast is helping with. I don't know how much of the patent review will be on the website at 1.0 beta-time. For the most part, I've been keeping my head technical and not tracking the publicity or legal push going on around me at iCast; I know that the lawyers so far are very comfortable with the patent review, but I don't know what documents they've produced so far to prove we're not just bluffing:-)
Of course, results of the legal review will be public knowledge as soon as it's finished. So far, no surprises (I have more patent summaries in my inbox to review right now...)
If you're not keeping up, please don't quote obsolete facts as current truth.
The Slashdot posting in April was prealpha code. Substantial development and tuning has happened since then; not only is average Ogg filesize now *smaller* than mp3, the audio quality is much improved. We're now four days from 1.0 beta. Go get it and see for yourself if you don't believe me.
Not only does it say "128kbps per channel" (which is 256kbps stereo), that's just the intended usage range. Many of the developers who have been with us more than a few months remember Vorbis' original encoding mode of roughly 500kbps:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, I just believe that there are limits on reasonable behavior. Someday I hope to [modestly] cash in on Ogg along with everyone else... but only once it's established and well defended against IP terrorism. Don't read me to be a total angel-- that's Linus's position ;-)
As for a donations page, well, we were actually in denial for a long time that folks would actually be asking to donate money. We were wrong. We've seen the error of our ways, wholeheartedly apologize, and are doing the paperwork (and setting up the means) by which we can accept donations from generous supporters such as yourself.
Monty
As an individual, sure, you have relatively little to worry about. Except that all the really *fun* artists and companies will spend more time worrying about the bottom line than getting music to you to enjoy.
Oh and don't forget about all the restrictions on when you can use your music. SDMI may yet require you to listen on only a single 'approved' player. Buy a copy for your desktop, another for your portable, another for the backup disc... SDMI and FhG are on friendly terms.
We're making Vorbis for everybody, and that includes all the companies and artists, big and small. The small fry (who can't afford mp3) have the most to gain. The big fry are happy too because this whacks a chunk of money right out of expenses. It levels the technological playing field and makes it easier for everyone to make money at the same time it keeps the technology free (and interoperable: easy to use)
Mmmm. Makes me just want to go lie down in a peaceful, sunny field of flowers (and code, of course).
Monty
Ogg is and always has been under Xiphophorus, a registered S-corporation in Somerville, Massachusetts. Xiphophorus holds all the copyrights.
Xiph.org would be the target, not any contributors.
Monty
Oh, erm, actually I was only talking to the folks that seemed ready to flee if MPEG said "boo". Sort of a "stop running, good, now breathe deeply, yes, good" in calm soothing tones.
Now if you're pissed and feel like getting a few hundred developers to march on Thomson headquarters with flaming torches (maybe we could get the Large Hot Pipe Organ to play) to make our opinions known (loudly, spectacularly, but peacefully), I'll volunteer right now for propane torch duty so long as someone volunteers crash space for the sleepover!
Monty
.
My Iomega HipZip plays .oggs, but I'm not allowed to give out that firmware version yet. For those of you who have the HipZip, had you wondered why the xiph.org twirlfish logo was in the 'about player' menu? :-)
Monty
An astute observation.
Actually we are trying to set things up such that xiph.org is the only easy target in any litigation that might come Vorbis's way. The idea, obviously, is to mimimize potential liability of any industry adoptees--- not because it's strictly necessary, but because the industry is more likely to adopt if we can give them additional armor-plated warm fuzzies.
Monty
Troll. Your mama would spank you.
I was never a VQF developer. One of my professors in Japan, Sadoaki Furui, is head of NTT Human Interfaces lab, which developed the original VQF, then called TwinVQ. The fact that we knew each other was the limit of the overlap (and we met exactly because we both worked in compression).
Any technical commonality (there is some) is coincidental. Both TwinVQ and Vorbis draw more from speech encoding technology than mp3 does.
(Incidentally, VQF has noise problems because of the way the lossy/nonuniform vector quantization interleaves MDCT scalars. Vorbis works differently).
Vorbis was never a 'limited hack of VQF'. Please, *do* go inspect the original CVS snapshots as well as the previous generations of Xiph.org codecs, Squish, '95' and Stormbringer, all of which predate TwinVQ.
But, eh, I just fell for arguing eith a fool. Now I feel all dirty.
Monty
Don't attack Eric for telling what he sees to be the truth. That's his job.
Behind the scenes, he's a friend of the Ogg project and has been for some time. He's doing his job by calling it how he sees it, and we don't ask him to spin the facts toward our favor. He also doesn't have control over which quote a reporter will choose.
Monty
Linde said what he said only because it was an opportunity for some free FUD. Between the lines, it says, "we're worried/scared, they're on our radar, and we need to make some noise. Words are cheaper than lawyers."
Big surprise.
If Slashdotters didn't expect that already, well, shame on you. Sudden worried speculation about Fraunhofer's and Thomson's 'newly ominous tone' is just the snowball they'd like to start (while pressing full-steam ahead with the new webcast and download licensing). I'd be annoyed if they managed to start it with a single public sentence (we've known they didn't like us for quite a while in private). Let's not be a herd of sheep being maneuvered into the chute.
Thomson and FhG both have a reputation of a loud bark, but tend to pursue relatively little litigation in practice and they'll have to work hard to find basis against Xiphophorus. When we did our patent review, we focused on the FhG/Thomson MPEG patents. Our counsel advises us we don't infringe, what we knew already.
In other words, nothing's changed from yesterday except that Linde has decided to bluff before the call.
Monty
Stop using top to measure light duty application CPU usage; it's not very accurate (easily off by more than 15% due to undersampling problems).
:-) ... and I can't wait until the firmware version with Vorbis support is finally marked off as 'ready for release to public'.
The reference decoder (in beta 3, due tomorrow) is currently about half the speed of the fastest mp3 decoder we've benched against (and equal to a few), so we're not that far behind after only spending about two days on optimization.
As for hardware, *I* own a Vorbis handheld player (Iomega HipZip
I have to get back to the beta 3 release. See y'all later...
Monty
Yout all are bound to do a better job than The Shrub...
Monty
Napster supports .ogg... however, finding a Napster client that knows this is a bit more challenging ;-)
Monty
Your voice observations are correct; mp3 has the same problem at comparable bitrates (compare ogg/mp3 in mono to see). Voice contains alot of high-frequency, highly correlated 'noise', but it's pulsed (and this is why all cutting edge voice codes are time-based and pulse/noise excited). mp3 has the same problems, but the extra boost of mid/side stereo is just enough to mask it (mp3 is actually starving the side channel to give you effectively a single 128kbps mono for voice)
This voice problem (and pulsed noise artifacts in general) the last artifact we're actively working on. That along with channel coupling coming soon in Ogg should be enough eliminate the problem. We have the problem about half-licked in beta 2, but not completely eliminated at 128kbps; at 160 and above, there are enough extra bits to just snow the sample with extra resolution until the problem disappears.
Monty
Right now, there's a comment header that allows text labels like 'TITLE', 'ARTIST', etc. A description of this header is in the CVS source int he doc/ directory.
A metadata stream type is in progress; see the vorbis and vorbis-dev mailing list archives at xiph.org to see ongoing and past discussion.
Monty
First, Beta 2 is not out yet!. It'll be on www.vorbis.org and www.vorbis.com in inch high letters when it is :-) We're still shooting for releasing tomorrow.
Consumers are not going to switch, the industry is. Both small and large industry players are going to try to avoid mp3 because of the licensing. For a small artist, $15,000 is alot of money. For the big companies, a flat percentage/per track fee is a huge chunk of cash. I stand to save my sponsor, iCast, around eight figures next year and they're not even one of the industry 'heavyweights' (yetNow, the Slashdot crowd is not the typical herd of consumer sheep, but we're also a drop in the consumer bucket (we have more weight as techies than marketing segments). Ogg Vorbis will achieve market penetration top down because it saves everyone a ton of money and frees business plans from a large, uncontrollable external influence And if *companies* will use Vorbis to eliminate being yanked around (who says mp3 prices aren't going to go up? Remember, FhG reserves the right to set licensing case-by-case; MusicMatch gave away around 20% of their company for a free encoder license), the Right Thing for individuals is even more clear.
"Ogg Vorbis: Don't sell your Soul (or your equity)"
Actually, this is backwards. Beta died exactly because Sony strangled the format with licensing in order to keep complete control of it. VHS won because of relatively open licensing. First off, you're probably comparing beta 1; there were several analysis bugs that are fixed in CVS and beta 2.Secondly, I mentioned although I did not emphasize, that Ogg Vorbis does not currently have channel coupling. If you're comparing Ogg Vorbis to LAME, you're comparing an essentially 'bundled mono' compression [today] to mid/side stereo in mp3. If you tell lame to compress two mono channels (like *current* Ogg Vorbis is), you'll see that you need to hike LAME up to about 192-225kbps to compare to Vorbis 128kbps in non-mid/side stereo. The fact that Vorbis (l/r stereo) still often beats LAME (m/s stereo) is astounding.
Yeah, it's not fair to say 'we're better than mp3 if you cripple mp3'. The point is that this is the next feature we're implementing and at that point, our bitrate, for a given stereo quality, will drop by about 40% just like in mp3. From Segher, a hardcore mp3 hacker and friend:
(I was being conservative with 30-50kbps) You're right. There's no secret conspiracy. It's all very out in the open. MPEG (FhG especially) is fundamental in developing SDMI, and RIAA-mandated SDMI is an integral part of AAC/MPEG4.Courtney Love and others go off on this particular rant much better than I do, so I'll let it go at that ;-)
Correct, but that is not the case here.MPEG is not non-commercial (why do people thing they are?). It is an industry standards consortium. The aim of the RIAA and MPEG is to *make money* and maintain the necessary control to do so. That does not mean that they will act abusively, however the chances of them doing so are greater without any moderating agent.
Who here remembers the old phone company joke [back when AT&T had a monopoly in the US]: "We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company."? Extrapolate and roleplay accordingly. Why do people get up in arms about Echelon controlling/monitoring email when it's perfectly OK for MPEG/RIAA/SDMI to do the same thing?
Also true for now. Vorbis decode is *not* more complex than mp3, I'm simply a better engineer than I am an optimizer. Decode is bound on the iMDCT and iDRFT transforms I wrote (couldn't find any open source for them at the time) and they're not particularly speedy. Segher, Takehiro from GOGO/LAME and others are looking at making my solid but slow code a little less station-wagon-like(BTW, if you're using top to see CPU usage, you're suffering from undersampling inaccuracy. At a minimum, compare mp3 decoders to vorbis decoders using 'time' not 'top' ;-)
IP patents are slowly turning into "watch the USPTO go clinically insane", so there are no guarantees. However, iCAST is footing the bill for an independent patent review of Ogg Vorbis. I'm probably not allowed to make an official statement at this time, but I will say (whether I should or notWe'll have an official statement eventually, but the Wheels of Justice are already grinding much faster than the lawyers involved are used to ;-)
I will also say I've been pleasantly surprised at how technically sharp the lawyers we're working with are.
Unfortunately I don't get to talk about the industry secrets that don't belong to me.
:-)
But anyway, I've been doomed for about six years now. Check back again in a year to see if I'm still doomed
Monty
People keep asking, so I'll just post it. From the name page:
MontyOur software implementation is LGPL (for the libs) and GPL (for the utils). That's just *our* Ogg software.
Monty
Monty
Jack Moffitt is overseeing Ogg's production and implementation within iCast. He's one of those truly rare breed of geek; he not only has a technical whip (and knows how to use it), he enjoys talking to people, drumming up support, evangelizing and remembering all the names at a meeting.
Ogg got written because of me... but Ogg is getting the attention it deserves because of Jack.
Monty
Converting from mp3 to Ogg is going to make a pretty nasty file actually. Not only is a bunch of quality going to be gone.... but Ogg is going to spend losts of bits trying to encode mp3's artifacts! :-)
Monty
The extention is .ogg
Monty
You're not the first to 'call' on this issue :-) And you definately should.
:-)
The legal review of Ogg and Vorbis patent status is one of the things iCast is helping with. I don't know how much of the patent review will be on the website at 1.0 beta-time. For the most part, I've been keeping my head technical and not tracking the publicity or legal push going on around me at iCast; I know that the lawyers so far are very comfortable with the patent review, but I don't know what documents they've produced so far to prove we're not just bluffing
Of course, results of the legal review will be public knowledge as soon as it's finished. So far, no surprises (I have more patent summaries in my inbox to review right now...)
Monty
If you're not keeping up, please don't quote obsolete facts as current truth.
The Slashdot posting in April was prealpha code. Substantial development and tuning has happened since then; not only is average Ogg filesize now *smaller* than mp3, the audio quality is much improved. We're now four days from 1.0 beta. Go get it and see for yourself if you don't believe me.
Monty
Not only does it say "128kbps per channel" (which is 256kbps stereo), that's just the intended usage range. Many of the developers who have been with us more than a few months remember Vorbis' original encoding mode of roughly 500kbps :-)
Monty