Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?
Reply #47 – 2019-05-12 17:08:33
Unfortunately, they refuse to implement proper support for Opus in the system codecs, so using it properly requires bringing in something like VLC. Or GMMP, or Foobar2k Mobile, or... probably dozens of other third party players. I have been using Opus on Android (with different phones & Android versions) for years now.One of the big sticking points with Vorbis was that it never lived up to its full potential because the reference encoder (which is unfortunately what gets packed into Linux distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, ugh) didn't merge back the quality or performance improvements of the AoTuv and Lancer patches. So you have to figure out how to use a forked encoder to use Vorbis properly. You make it sound (pun unintended) like the stock libvorbis encoder is bad. It is not. It is good and mature. If I remember correctly, AoTuV is only marginally better, at low bitrates, and does that in a large part by increasing bitrates significantly for difficult samples.As is usual with the Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers software development model, instead of improving Vorbis, they created something new and incompatible instead. Yeah of course, that is totally how it went. CELT & co. and all the work on low latency and speech encoding is also fake news I guess? Even in Free Software, support for Opus isn't very good in some cases. Like some tagging software. The tag format is exactly the same between Vorbis and Opus (VorbisComment). With many popular tagging libraries, like Mutagen, the code path is the same, and the program does not need to know if its Vorbis or Opus. At this point tagging programs that don't support Opus are likely abandoned anyway.So they've created a mess of codecs and forked software, half-baked implementations, and varying degrees of compatibility all around Please be specific, this nothing but FUD, not backup by facts.when they could have just left things alone and worked on what already existed. I don't think the improvements brought by Opus (quality and feature wise), could have been implemented in Vorbis without breaking the format specification. PS : I am not related with Xiph in any way, and I don't think everything they do is perfect, both for the Vorbis maintenance, and the Opus development, but overall I appreciate their work.