HydrogenAudio

Lossy Audio Compression => Ogg Vorbis => Ogg Vorbis - General => Topic started by: rjamorim on 2007-03-03 15:03:48

Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-03 15:03:48
Today I was checking RareWares' links page to find broken links, and happened upon Xiph's page. I noticed the "news" there were 3-4 years old.

So I was wondering, does anyone, by any chance, know what is going on there? Are they working on Vorbis2, or Tarkin, or Theora? Have they disbanded and only the web pages remain? I remember that in Emmett (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showuser=17220)'s time, he would feed us news non-stop, mostly from #vorbis (he was a little too loud, matter of factly :B). Now, we listen nothing but crickets.

Do we have some insider here that knows if something is going on there, at all? Maybe Coalson or Valin?

And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?

Thanks for any info.

R.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: HotshotGG on 2007-03-03 19:12:58
Quote
And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?


He is longer the "CEO" he is working on other projects nowadays isn't he?  Do they still have there monthly IRC meetings? those were always some good indication of what was going on
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-03 19:22:18
He is longer the "CEO" he is working on other projects nowadays isn't he?


Actually they made a press release to announce he was departing :B
http://www.xiph.org/press/2003/ceo/ (http://www.xiph.org/press/2003/ceo/)

To the best of my knowledge, he worked a while at Neuros, and left soon afterwards. No idea what he's up to these days.

Quote
Do they still have there monthly IRC meetings? those were always some good indication of what was going on


I tried to find IRC logs, to no avail
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: jorsol on 2007-03-03 19:47:03
Well I try to follow the progress in Xiph by the stats of SVN Xiph CIA (http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/xiph) and the Monthly Meeting (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MonthlyMeeting).

I found that there is almost null development for Vorbis and Theora...

Tarkin is just vapourware and is not developed anymore... Theora has almost no development (sice alpha7), there is a fully functional decoder in the theora-exp branch but the main library (libtheora) is just incomplete, and over the years mainly a few bugfixes and no quality or improvements.

Vorbis II is just a bunch of ideas and graphs but nothing funcional (vapourware too) or in active development, note that the name of Vorbis II will probably not be used because Monty dont like it, it will be know as "Ghost", so the correct name for Vorbis II is Ghost...

In the mailing list Ralph Giles said that they have not merged aoTuV R1 (or probably b5) to the main libvorbis because they have to check the changes and Monty is the only one that can do that... this is what Ralph said:
Quote
We agree the changes should be merged. The last time that was done, Monty
was able to further improve the code on both sides. We'd like that code
review to happen again before merging the aoTuV branch into the
official reference encoder. However, Monty is the only one of the
current volunteers we trust to do that, and he doesn't have time in the
foreseeable future. So while it's on the todo list there is no schedule.
and because he has not time to do it they have not merged it yet. Is just curious that Monty don't have time to do it when I see a lot of submits from him to SVN (http://cia.navi.cx/stats/author/xiphmont) for "sushivision"...

In other words there is no future for ogg codecs if their creators don't care about it... they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-03 20:11:50
and because he has not time to do it they have not merged it yet.


But WTF is he wasting his time on, I wonder? :-B

Quote
In other words there is no future for ogg codecs if their creators don't care about it... they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...


Shit. Somebody should just go ahead, fork everything and start a new project, bringing along people like aoyumi, Blacksword, QuantumKnot...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: jaybeee on 2007-03-03 20:19:07
Shit. Somebody should just go ahead, fork everything and start a new project, bringing along people like aoyumi, Blacksword, QuantumKnot...
yep, totally

Monty is a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) to quote an IT term. But seriously, it's true. If only Monty can do what the audio community would like, then that's a bad thing. Maybe it's time to move on...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Lyx on 2007-03-03 20:22:59
Shit. Somebody should just go ahead, fork everything and start a new project, bringing along people like aoyumi, Blacksword, QuantumKnot...
yep, totally

Monty is a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) to quote an IT term. But seriously, it's true. If only Monty can do what the audio community would like, then that's a bad thing. Maybe it's time to move on...

This should have happened 2 years ago already - its long overdue.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Emmett on 2007-03-03 22:59:19
And what the hell is Emmett up to anyway?


I've been working on a few different things in a few different areas, but for the most part I've been writing new things and managing things here at Sonivius, which is my production company here in Philadelphia. It's nice to know that people still care. :)

As far as what Xiph is doing, I've got no idea -- I'm out of the scene as anything but a content producer.

It seems as though people are kinda pissed off about how it seems that nothing is happening over there. I can't really blame them, but I would caution against making too many assumptions. They could be hard at work on something new and interesting -- I suspect that someone 'in the know' will drop in soon enough and give a full download.

I've been thinking about the current situation of free-and-open tools for multimedia production a lot (I work with this stuff every day), and I can't help but think that it might be time to open up a research and development lab here at Sonivius to make things work a little better.

One of the things that kinda bugs me is that there's a lot of good stuff out there, but it's locked up in libraries and applications that are a pain in the ass to find, dependencies to manage... From a production standpoint, it's very annoying. What version are we using? Is there some guy halfway across the world with a better version that we should be using, and do we have to be subscribed to an arcane mailing list to know about it? Do we really need to set up a Linux box with a solid dev environment and compile things just to encode some video?

These kinds of questions are easy to answer for the kind of people that hang out on HA and check IRC and subscribe to mailing lists. I'm a producer that has that kind of connection, but I don't know anyone else like me that wants to take this kind of time to get work done. The last-mile of free and open multimedia solutions kinda sucks. Actually, it doesn't kinda suck, it sucks a lot.

Maybe it's time for me to get back in the game.

Emmett Plant
Sonivius, Inc.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-03 23:17:42
Maybe it's time for me to get back in the game.


Sweet

Planning anything yet?
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Emmett on 2007-03-04 00:22:17
Planning anything yet?

I've got some ideas, and it seems that the folks on the Sonivius board are pretty enthusiastic about them. Maybe folks here would like to kick up some dust, as well? Lemme know, folks.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-03-04 03:29:42
Do you remember this thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=43783)?
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Emmett on 2007-03-04 05:02:12
Do you remember this thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=43783)?


I don't, I wasn't around for it. It looks like it starts out with the same kind of thing I keep hearing (Xiph is doing nothing), but ends with a reality (Xiph isn't working on the precise thing you want them to work on). Maybe they're doing great stuff and they're just not really talking about it -- This isn't really a new condition at Xiph. It is the way things are, and the way things have been for a while.

Like I said, I'm a lot more interested in the last mile. I'm interested in working on the toolchain that gets us away from things like DirectShow filters and specific versions of specific applications using specific libraries on specific platforms. It's just not helpful. When I say, 'I want to play this file,' I need to have an answer like, 'You want Application X, you can get it at Website X, and there are copies there for Windows, OS X and Linux.'

I also desperately want that answer to be correct and for the person asking the question to be satisfied with the output of the application. You can't please everyone all the time, but if you have decent last-mile solutions that don't require people to actually know what muxing is, what DirectShow filters are and the difference between something called 'speex' and something called 'granulepos,' these tiny issues from the software-authoring stages of the game become less relevant.

I'll say this again, because I want this to be crystal-clear -- I'm not really interested in getting into a pissing contest with Xiph over your favorite potential feature being implemented in their official releases. I'm a lot more interested in bringing this technology to a place where it's easy for people to author and distribute content with these open and free technologies, and a place where it's easy for people to obtain and view this content.

There's a point at which you have to work with the best of what's there, and not get heavily involved in what I would consider to be codebase minutiae. At the end of the day, it affects me as a producer to the tune of 'nothing,' and to people that view my product to the tune of 'nothing.' It is a binary switch -- It either works or it doesn't, and I'm interested in making it work.

The demands of my company and other companies I work with are not the same demands of most codehackers and specification-junkies. We need authoring tools that work 100% of the time with a minimum investment of time and energy. We cannot be reasonably expected to compile things or hunt for stuff on rarewares for hours, hoping we've got the right lib.

I hope this at least puts some things in perspective in terms of the kind of things I want to work on, and I'm hoping to find a couple of devs interested in helping me out. The last mile is more important than you probably think, and there's a great big world out there of people to whom only the last mile is important.

Emmett
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: clb3092 on 2007-03-04 08:04:56
You know, even if Xiph has slipped into coma OGG oddly enough still seems to be vital and progressing in a very odd way. This seems to be for two reasons. First reason is because of Autovo, who has managed to evolve  the codec into something very interesting. Some people seem to think that his changes are really more minor tuning than a technical "revolution." Other people seem to think just the opposite.  I don't care about people's opinion of what Autovo has done. I just know that the last version sounds great! When I play back q8.5 recordings on my audio U3 I can hear things like the natural tones of the instruments of great jazz players such as Charlie Mingus or Winston Marsillas. It sure as hell kicks MP3's ass and I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better. No bad for a free lossy codec.

The other reason is the growing MP3 licensing meltdown. Thompson's has raised their licensing fees to unreasonable levels for a pretty crappy codec, MP3. Add to that the recent judgment against Microsoft for 1.6 billion dollars won by lucent. So on top of paying through the nose for licensing crappy mp3 technology, you might still have to pay even more to lucent!!!! Not to mention the possibility that lucent might have a legal claim on YOUR future earnings even though you thought that you legally licensed mp3!!

This IS the sort of environment that can make a content producers find out if the rumors about some guy half way across the planet does have a better way of doing things.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Firon on 2007-03-04 08:12:45
The problem with having aoTuV is that it's not official. A bunch of people don't even KNOW it exists. If it was the official Vorbis, then it'd be getting a lot more usage and Vorbis would look a lot better.

Tremor, on the other hand, uses a ton of memory (code + tables + buffer). I'd still like for memory reduction to be lowered. And maybe CPU usage. It's completely dead. Hasn't seen an actual, code-related commit in years.

I really wish Xiph would be active. I also wished they'd improve the Vorbis situation so it gets even more hardware support. Hell, Rockbox has made some improvements to Tremor, but you don't see that being merged back into the main trunk. It's a shame.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: kjoonlee on 2007-03-04 10:51:29
Vorbis II is just a bunch of ideas and graphs but nothing funcional (vapourware too) or in active development, note that the name of Vorbis II will probably not be used because Monty dont like it, it will be know as "Ghost", so the correct name for Vorbis II is Ghost...

I thought Ghost was Speex II, with the Vorbis I psymodel.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: eofor on 2007-03-04 12:07:49
I just know that the last version sounds great! When I play back q8.5 recordings on my audio U3 I can hear things like the natural tones of the instruments of great jazz players such as Charlie Mingus or Winston Marsillas. It sure as hell kicks MP3's ass and I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better. No bad for a free lossy codec.


It's good to see that you're enthousiastic about the developments, but I have to call TOS#8 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=3974) here - if you make a statement like this, you need proof (ie, ABX test results).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-04 12:24:46
Do you remember this thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=43783)?


The problem I see with that thread is that it got derailed after it was claimed that all Xiph projects are dead, jmvalin didn't like that statement and the original focus was lost.

I agree not all Xiph projects are dead, but that's mostly thanks to individual developers than Xiph itself - that is, the projects would still be alive even if Xiph didn't exist. Valin keeps Speex alive, Coalson keeps FLAC alive, and even aoyumi and Blacksword keep vorbis somewhat alive.

The issue is not Xiph's projects being dead, it is Xiph itself looking dead.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-03-04 13:11:02
Well it was me, ho stated that the projects are dead, which was to hard.  But most project haven't announced any news since then.

I absolutely agree with Emmett regarding the last mile. There are great things available in the sources at Xiph.org, but unusable for most people. The only exception is the Ogg Vorbis format. There are many great tools to create, tag and play it. But I don't know any tool to work with Ogg files, like we have YAMB/MP4Box for MP4 and MKVToolnix for Matroska files. If I wanted to create a Ogg Theora/Vorbis file, I have no idea how to do it without using command line.

At least the playback issues I mentioned before are gone with latest Haali's splitter and ffdshow. Also if anyone wants a just-working solution to play Ogg Theora files, there is the VLC player which is available for almost all platforms. These are good news, but I think to spread the format a web plugin is needed. But I see some development in this directin, which is a good news. There is a working sample in Java (http://menguy.aymeric.free.fr/theora/demonstration.php).

A YouTube like server based on Ogg Theora/Vorbis would be really nice 
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Lyx on 2007-03-04 13:17:48
I made experience with that last-mile thing issue recently. I wanted to cut a movie (OGM container, vorbis audiostream, xvid video) into parts and then rearrange those and rejoin them. And i wanted to do that in a simple GUI app without reencoding. The only app on win32 which was supposed to do that was VirtualDubMod - but the current version would instant-crash on my coreDuo. After reading lots of messageboards, websearching and various trial and error, i found out that a 2 year older release of VirtualDubMod would not crash and do what i want. I doubt that any "normal" user would want to go through so much hassle - he or she would simply come to the conclusion "OGM sucks!".

And this was just about a container.

- Lyx
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: jorsol on 2007-03-04 17:24:46

Vorbis II is just a bunch of ideas and graphs but nothing funcional (vapourware too) or in active development, note that the name of Vorbis II will probably not be used because Monty dont like it, it will be know as "Ghost", so the correct name for Vorbis II is Ghost...

I thought Ghost was Speex II, with the Vorbis I psymodel.
Ghost is somewhat being designed by Christopher Montgomery (Vorbis) and Jean-Marc Valin (Speex), the problem is that Valin wants that Ghost take another direction that Monty wants, but no, Speex II is not Speex with Vorbis I psymodel... AFAIK Speex 1.2 will have the vorbis psymodel.

Maybe Valin can help to clear the things about Ghost?
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: PatchWorKs on 2007-03-04 17:35:57
The most active Xiph project nowdays seems to be Theora...

BTW, there are some interesting ideas (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code) for the next SoC
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Kim_C on 2007-03-04 19:08:11
The most active Xiph project nowdays seems to be Theora...

Of which development has been nonexistant for some (long?) time...

Log from Monthly Meeting in february (http://people.xiph.org/~giles/2007/200702_meeting.txt)
Quote
<rillian> theora: remains stalled

BTW, there are some interesting ideas (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code) for the next SoC

..which most are from last year's SOC. And some of those are last years active projects which had developers who somehow disappeared... (at least one did because of unfortunate accident, don't know/remember about others).

Btw, here is preliminary ideas and discussion about Ghost:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Ghost (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Ghost)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Emmett on 2007-03-04 19:16:58
BTW, there are some interesting ideas (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code) for the next SoC ;)

There is one (count 'em) item on the SoC that could be considered 'last-mile,' and it's 'audio encoders in QuickTime/CoreAudio.' That's all. The other thing that maybe comes close is Theora implementation in a piece of chat software for Gnome, which borders on the incredibly unexciting as the installed base of this particular application is likely a rounding error compared to the installed base of popular alternatives.

Yes, there's interesting stuff there, but the vast majority of it doesn't overlap with the kind of thing I want to get done.

Emmett
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Lych on 2007-03-05 00:26:29
With all due respect to Vorbis, Theora, etc. Xiph is in bad shape.  I'm glad to hear that people are still developing Vorbis on their own and are keeping the codec in active development (sort of).  As for Xiph all I can say is "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Firon on 2007-03-05 04:52:22
I doubt that any "normal" user would want to go through so much hassle - he or she would simply come to the conclusion "OGM sucks!".

And this was just about a container.

- Lyx


OGM DOES suck. It's a very hacky container.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: spoon on 2007-03-05 09:21:08
The last thing Ogg Vorbis needs now is Ogg Vorbis II, it would fragment its already small market share.

>they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even
> know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...

You would expect more enthusiasm if it was a hobby, atleast someone would spend a Saturday afternoon on it.

To sum up Ogg Vorbis, it is a ship without a captain, with engine trouble, there are a few people in the boiler room auToV, Blacksword, etc hammering away to keep the engines turning, but with no one up on the bridge, that ship is not going anywhere.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Kef on 2007-03-05 10:45:46
The last thing Ogg Vorbis needs now is Ogg Vorbis II, it would fragment its already small market share.

>they work on it someting like a hobby... probably they don't even
> know the potential that their codecs have in the world... is a shame...

You would expect more enthusiasm if it was a hobby, atleast someone would spend a Saturday afternoon on it.

To sum up Ogg Vorbis, it is a ship without a captain, with engine trouble, there are a few people in the boiler room auToV, Blacksword, etc hammering away to keep the engines turning, but with no one up on the bridge, that ship is not going anywhere.


Unfortunately I must say I agree. It's sad, I have more than half of my music collection in Ogg Vorbis and I fear within the next few years hardware support will become worse than it is today and Vorbis will be obsolete because there is no work put into it. Sure, tuning projects like aoTuV and Lancer has kept Vorbis alive for the last couple of years, but how long will they have time to put into it? I just wish there would be more talented people who could contribute...

/Kef
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: eofor on 2007-03-05 13:07:51
As a successor/alternative to mp3, Vorbis has been overtaken in a remarkably short period of time by AAC, not in the least because of AAC's cheap and flexible licensing model (much better than mp3, for example).

I feel that on the whole, the audio world should be very thankful to Xiph even if Vorbis should die as an actively developed, mainstream format: by just being there, as good as it is, the project has put pressure on the competition (mainly AAC, and to a lesser extent, WMA) to keep their licensing costs low enough to prevent users (i.e., application and hardware developers) from choosing Vorbis as the 'post-mp3' codec. In the end, this means cheaper products for everyone (a free iTunes/WMP/Winamp wouldn't have been possible under an MPEG-2-type license!)

The $25.000 cap on AAC decoding license fees, for example, is a flippin' bargain for any decent-size hardware or software developer. Even Vorbis can't match that as any big company using it would want to do at least some legal due diligence (with the Vorbis no-patents claim), and your average lawyer wouldn't even step out of bed for a fee like that.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vinnie97 on 2007-03-05 13:29:27
Yea, all this doom and gloom about Vorbis is disconcerting to see.  Living in the here and now, tests have shown you can't get any better for at least the 80 to 128 kbps range.  Since Vorbis is an open format, 3rd party support should never wane, so Rockbox will at least ensure its availability on DAPs in the foreseeable future.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying the hardware support that is available now.  Yes, it would be nice if there was more direction from a leader in order to steer this marvel of a format into the future but hobbyist fascinations come and go.  Live and let live!  If someone steps into a leadership position at Xiph.org and incorporates the latest tunings at least, more power to them.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: clb3092 on 2007-03-05 19:27:54

I just know that the last version sounds great! When I play back q8.5 recordings on my audio U3 I can hear things like the natural tones of the instruments of great jazz players such as Charlie Mingus or Winston Marsillas. It sure as hell kicks MP3's ass and I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better. No bad for a free lossy codec.


It's good to see that you're enthousiastic about the developments, but I have to call TOS#8 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=3974) here - if you make a statement like this, you need proof (ie, ABX test results).


Well, yes, but let me clarify my original post by slight rewording: "In my opinion I honestly can't say if 320kbs AAC is better ..." I did use the personal pronoun "I" in the original post. Now if I had used the third person impersonal "it" in the original  post (ex: "It is clear that 320kbs..." or "It has been shown that 320kbs...") you would be correct.

Yes, Xiph is in bad shape, but ogg is far from waning. Hardware support for ogg is not currently wanning at all. I  went shopping for a PAP in dec 2006 and I had a surprising choice for PAPs that supported ogg. Most of the models were new to the market. Toshiba, Samsung, Iriver, iAudio etc... Just no options from from the "big 3", Zune, Creative and IPOD.

I don't thing a Vorbis II would fracture the market because there seems to be a such a strong desire for producers of content to find anything but MP3. By producers of content I mean artists(they also don't like middle men taking large chunks out of their revenue), producers, software producers(everyone from decoder writers to media players for PCs creators, etc...) and distributors(mainly online down loadable content shops like Itunes music store etc...).

I understand the point that technically ogg is not zero legal fee cost for a software producer who may want to use it. But the point is probably exaggerated. By the same token, if you think you should pay a lawyer to cover your rear because Ogg's patent may or may not be completely solid, then the same is true for AAC. How can you be sure that the AAC patent is completely solid and the 25$ licensing fee will be the only licensing fee you will be legally obligated to pay? Recent events in litigation have shown that you may not be able to assume that about any claim on any codec!
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: HotshotGG on 2007-03-05 20:21:41
Quote
Since Vorbis is an open format, 3rd party support should never wane, so Rockbox will at least ensure its availability on DAPs in the foreseeable future.


That's how percieve it is. Open source projects really never die they just slow down to a sluggish halt until they are ressurected by somebody who wants to continue to put the developement time and effort into them. The drawback is that sometimes it takes years. I don't really see Ghost as being anything more then experimental branch in the CVS due to the fact that it would probably be impossible to make it backwards compatible with any of the current source code that's out there. 

I was impressed that they did publish a research paper regarding Speex 1.2 for AES though:

http://people.xiph.org/~jm/papers/aes120_speex_vorbis.pdf (http://people.xiph.org/~jm/papers/aes120_speex_vorbis.pdf)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Lyx on 2007-03-05 20:37:18
I did use the personal pronoun "I" in the original post. Now if I had used the third person impersonal "it" in the original  post (ex: "It is clear that 320kbs..." or "It has been shown that 320kbs...") you would be correct.

He is correct anyways, because to put it simply: "opinions" about soundquality aren't allowed on this board. If someone makes a claim, he HAS to prove it. It is not an option, but a requirement.

To be upfront here: i doubt that you can ABX q3.0 from your stated q8.5 and are just praising your imagination here.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: SebastianG on 2007-03-05 21:37:26
Hi! I just wanted to say there's currently some noise in the vorbis-dev mailing list. Mostly about multichannel coupling and a possible Ambisonics extension to the "standard". I tried to contribute to the discussion by explaining what the specification allows in terms of joint channel coding and by talking about solutions within the spec that seemed most practicable to me.

But we all know that's not enough for something to happen.


I'd like to pose this counter question:
What could Xiph do with its limited resources?


Cheers!
SG
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Firon on 2007-03-06 06:30:56
Get someone besides Monty to merge aoyumi's work with the trunk. And find a way to spark more interest in Vorbis, especially by programmers and hardware manufacturers, to get some improvements in it and more support.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: gameplaya15143 on 2007-03-08 18:59:03
multichannel coupling
That would give vorbis a HUGE boost in usefulness.  At q0 with 6ch it ends up at around ~250kbps, that just can't compete with he-aac smashing 6ch into ~100kbps (q-2 only gets it down to ~160kbps).

If point stereo is any indication (phase stereo isn't even in current vorbis is it?)
q0
1ch 56kbps
2ch 64kbps
in theory, perhaps
3ch 80kbps
4ch 96kbps
5ch 112kbps
6ch 128kbps <- a much more reasonable number

Why arbitray channel coupling wasn't built into vorbis in the first place, I'll never understand.

Multichannel coupling for vorbis is the boost that Ogg needs right now, not so much a fully developed video codec (although I wish tarkin was more real).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-03-12 22:17:30
Hi! I just wanted to say there's currently some noise in the vorbis-dev mailing list. Mostly about multichannel coupling and a possible Ambisonics extension to the "standard".


Nothing new there. Monty has been talking about Ambisonics since 2003 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=10313&view=findpost&p=114435).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: fpi on 2007-03-15 11:08:36
Today I was checking RareWares' links page to find broken links, and happened upon Xiph's page. I noticed the "news" there were 3-4 years old.


The news page is on the wiki:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Current_events (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Current_events)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: jmvalin on 2007-03-15 23:26:21
Ghost is somewhat being designed by Christopher Montgomery (Vorbis) and Jean-Marc Valin (Speex), the problem is that Valin wants that Ghost take another direction that Monty wants, but no, Speex II is not Speex with Vorbis I psymodel... AFAIK Speex 1.2 will have the vorbis psymodel.

Maybe Valin can help to clear the things about Ghost?


Let's just say we're hoping to kill two birds with one stone here. It's *way* to early to say how this thing turns out or whether it'll work at all. And yes, Ghost is very different from both Speex and Vorbis.

The issue is not Xiph's projects being dead, it is Xiph itself looking dead.


Not dead, but understaffed. There's simply not enough man-hour for the things we're trying to do. Of course, the place where it shows the most is the website because we've always had problems keeping webmasters around and it's sort of the last thing we care about when strapped for time. Hell, I don't even know how to make non-trivial changes to the Speex site 

Put the other way, Xiph.Org is no more, no less than the sum of all its contributors, plus a bit of infrastructure.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Justin Ruggles on 2007-03-17 22:39:59
I see that Xiph is mentoring projects for this year's Google Summer of Code.  One of the proposed projects is basically to be Monty's assistant in Ghost development.  There are also several Speex-related project ideas.  To me, this suggests that development at Xiph is still going strong, but like Jean-Marc said, needs more man-power.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Summer_of_Code)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: 3ngel on 2007-03-21 10:58:57
Hi to all,
i was just searching for information about multichannel encoding in OGG and i founded this thread.
Among these great audio developer minds, i would say that i'm with who that push for a reprise of the OGG development, so i really hope something will move on.
And i can say that for me too OGG sounds REALLY great
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Triza on 2007-03-22 21:41:06
I wish Monty would be like Josh for FLAC. The latter develops and markets his little baby, while Monty cannot finish anything. He just starts everything, but cannot see it through. He cannot even bother to encourage the integration of Aoyumi-s work into Vorbis. No nurturing of some these volunteers. Nothing. I am an Vorbis user and it will stay that way because the alternatives are still not good enough for me (several reasons), but should I need some other codecs in the future I will try to avoid everything Monty is involved in.

Triza
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: dyneq on 2007-03-22 23:08:44
I wish Monty would be like Josh for FLAC.


If you benefit from the development of open source software, enjoy it.  Make suggestions.  Turn your friends on to it.  Use it at work.

If you aren't directly helping with the development of open source software, then please don't criticize those who are.  Whatever Xiph needs right now to move forward, I'm pretty sure it isn't value judgements.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: MedO on 2007-03-23 10:46:47
...Monty cannot finish anything. He just starts everything, but cannot see it through.


Sounds a lot like me. 
Once I figure out how something can be done, actually doing it seems to become boring. I didn't follow developments at Xiph too closely, so what I'm saying is based mostly on what's written above in this thread, but maybe it'd be a good idea to let Monty go on inventing new stuff and then move on, and have someone else finish up after him. On this line of thinking, the Summer of Code project mentioned above could bring some interesting developments.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: aabxx on 2007-04-06 16:22:43
Why the heck is anyone complaining?

Trust me when I say potential vorbis users do not care about how xiph.org looks. No average joe will ever use vorbis... they don't use aac either except when it's from itunes. Those who have any interest in encoding to vorbis, are not average joes... they don't depend on any fancy homepage... you might know of this encoder called lame... notice any fancy official homepage (with binaries) for it? No, thought so. Noobs encode by pressing the rip button in their program suite. And they would sort of be pissed off if those sort of programs defaulted to "ogg vorbis"  Average users don't have any interest in vorbis, even if you tell them what it is.

Those who actually care hunt down lame, or vorbis if they care, and the recommended versions and settings.

Vorbis is still in development, and has been for a long time. Who cares if it's not monty anymore? Much respect to him but he's moved on and other capable people are now tweaking it. That happens all the time in the open source community and is the beauty of the concept. The linux world is growing, and vorbis with it. It has a decent amount of hardware support, which is actually incredible if you think about it. Many (most?) people here on HA use it. Many games use it. It is used by some anime encoders. It's a success story and it's not going anywhere soon. But yes, it will never be able to compete with AAC no matter how good it is. It caters to a niche and anyone who thought it would turn out differently would've been incredibly naive.

I am a freedom geek, so vorbis is an excellent product to me. It's top of the league in quality (for mono and stereo only, at this point admittedly) and it gives me a feelgood feeling philosophically.

Anyway I don't feel I have much to lose with vorbis. I use it for all my audio. If worst comes to worse and it dies in 5 years time, I can simply convert it to lossless without losing anymore quality. At that time I expect disk space will be a lot cheaper (100 gb bluray discs or something perhaps? ). Simple as that.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: rjamorim on 2007-04-06 17:18:14
you might know of this encoder called lame... notice any fancy official homepage (with binaries) for it?


Why, thank-you! (I created the LAME homepage, and for you ignorant fools, I explain: I did a minimalist design on the developers' request)

And binaries are not available because of patents, not because the lame devs are as lazy as Xiph developers. For all that it's worth, you can find sites hosting binaries at the links page.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Nick E on 2007-04-07 16:02:48
And they would sort of be pissed off if those sort of programs defaulted to "ogg vorbis".


I have used Vorbis, but I'd rather not on the whole. But I can't say it would bother me that much if an encoding program "defaulted to" it. I'd just change the setting.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-04-07 16:39:20
I think this is one of the major problems. There are some people (just average users) who read about Ogg Vorbis, they heard it sounds better then MP3 and they want to try it. So they get to the official webpage and they hope to get an official tool to convert their CDs to Ogg Vorbis. But what do they find? An outdated CLI encoder and obviously they have no idea how to use it. Then there are links to many programs and they have no idea which one to choose.

Many people need to be told what to do. Use program X to create, tag and play the Ogg Vorbis files. This is all what they need. They are confused if there are more choices.

Ogg Vorbis format has all the advantages you can imagine. So why only a few people (including me) use it? Wrong marketing and missing easy to use tools and guides. All the development is not concentrated in one places and there are no good informations for end users. If you want to be successful, you have to concentrate on end users.

Look at Firefox - if you download it and install, it is as simple as possible. No need to set up anything, just use it. If you need more functions, then you are probably an advanced user, who knows how to install the proper extension. Opera has too many functions in default install and so it confuses users. And the market share shows you clearly, what most users want - a save browser which is just working.

Another example is the Matroska project: you have an official MKVToolnix program from Moritz Bunkus, which will convert almost anything to Matroska format. Then you have an official DirectShow splitter from Haali which will enable playback in all DS players. There are also libraries for developers, so they can add matroska support to their applications. The result: Matroska is becoming more and more popular, although it has very hard competition in AVI, MP4 and TS.

An interesting bottom line is, that Matroska gains it's popularity also because of Vorbis. It is the only container (except of the dead OGM format), which can store Vorbis sound and MPEG-4 video.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: gameplaya15143 on 2007-04-12 23:04:22
it will never be able to compete with AAC no matter how good it is.
I think it is doing extremely well for something that is not backed by 'the industry' and has little/no official marketing/promotion (at least I don't see any).

Quote
It's top of the league in quality (for mono and stereo only, at this point admittedly) and it gives me a feelgood feeling philosophically.
Still.. ~250kbps for 6ch audio (q0) still isn't too bad... considering I won't use any less than 256kbps mp2/ac3 for 2ch dvd audio.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Synthetic Soul on 2007-04-14 06:54:06
Discussion about the Rarewares redesign moved to this thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=54147).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: maikmerten on 2007-04-23 15:57:56
As already said xiph.org is understaffed - and those people working on xiph.org projects have to make a living with "serious work", too.

Actually I think xiph.org is still functional. It's not a company, it's more group of people trying to provide free multimedia solutions - and they did an do succeed in their mission:

- Vorbis is still a very good audio codec. It's comparing nicely with the most widespread AAC profile (that'd be LC) and outclasses WMA and MP3.

- Theora isn't cutting edge - but it's getting its job done. It's a stable format, perfectly usable now. If you don't want to use MPEG or VC1 in your products you can opt for Theora and together with Vorbis have a complete Audio/Video solution in a free flavor.

- Speex is a very good speech codec. Flexible and powerful. It's even having wide adoption (Valve having it as codec option for in-game communication, Microsoft using it in Xbox Live etc.). It's very nature sorta moves it away from being perceived by end-users - but it's definately making people happy.

- FLAC is doing very nicely. Its compelling featureset  made it an accepted storage format for audio archival.


The other Xiph.org projects obviously are "still there", too, but perhaps not really visible to the end user.


As for Theora: Development has been slow, but it recently made important progress. It now has a fully functional decoder (merged from the experimental theora-exp thingie) and the encoder received some work, too. There's nothing better than writing a patch that get's accepted - now the encoder is using some additional flexibility which elevates it a bit from the VP3 codec (which, by the way, had a few bugs here and there that may very well impact on quality and that are fixed in Theora). And despite rumors saying otherwise: I feel Xiph.org *is* very open towards new developers. It took me like 3 days from deciding to work a bit on the encoder, learning C and getting the new encoder stuff into SVN. That may depend on the project, though - thanks to Theora's "alpha" stage (I feel it's doing better than "alpha" suggests, though) it's perhaps more open to new code than e.g. Vorbis, which needs extensive validation for any change.

There obviously are people outside of Xiph.org thinking that Ogg Vorbis/Theora is useful. It seems Opera and Mozilla will use those for the HTML5 <video> element. Open web, open formats, it's just a nice match.

As for Monty: AFAIK he's working for RedHat and is improving the media situation for Linux - he e.g. worked on the USB sound system in the past IIRC. That's for sure important, too, and will make many people happy. This sadly means that there's apparently little time to e.g. review the AoTuV changes.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: spoon on 2007-04-23 19:48:37
>This sadly means that there's apparently little time to e.g. review the AoTuV changes.

Then the reigns should be passed on to a suitale replacement (advertise for one), having someone who is effectively a spanner in the works (nothing against monty, but that is how it appears) is counter productive.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-04-24 18:11:48
maikmerten
I absolutely agree with everything you wrote. There are really great and free formats developed by Xiph.org, but you missed one point. Xiph.org badly failed in distributing those technologies to end users. Now many people might say: "I don't care about others and what they are using. I'm happy with Vorbis, I know how to create and play my files, so what's wrong." It's easy. We need end users and we need a lot of them. Why are there DVD players with MP3 and AVI/MPEG-4 (AKA DivX) support? Why almost all portable players, cellphones or car radios support MP3? Because many people are using these formats and if the device supports it, it is a big advantage in the market. So we need a lot of end users to gain support in as many devices as possible. But we won't have many users as long as there is a poor support for the format. So it is a vicious spiral. And we need to get out of it, soon! It's very similar to Linux - great operating system, which is to difficult for end users. And it also lacks support from most SW and HW makers.

I would never buy a player without Ogg Vorbis support, but how many people like me are out there? I'm afraid only a few. So Ogg Vorbis doesn't give a company much bigger advantage in the market. If we can change it, it will bring much more Ogg Vorbis users and therefore also much more support in HW players.

I think there really is a need for a simple to use tools to create and play Ogg files. One application, which would take whatever input (AC3, DTS, DVD, CD, AAC, MP3 etc.) and convert it to Ogg Vorbis. Then a video converter would be needed - convert AVI, DVD, WMV, MP4, MOV to Ogg Theora/Vorbis. People will also prefer an official player. VLC would be a good choice for video and maybe Winamp for audio. Then there should be links to add support to other players - Illiminable's filters for WMP, plugin for iTunes, Real Player etc. Ithink most of the tools are already out there, but it is difficult to find them or they don't have a user friendly GUI.

I think Xiph.org should now concentrate on the task to deliver the formats to end users. Else all the great ideas and many ours of programming and testing would run to waste.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: xiphmont on 2007-05-11 23:43:25

Vorbis II is just a bunch of ideas and graphs but nothing funcional (vapourware too) or in active development, note that the name of Vorbis II will probably not be used because Monty dont like it, it will be know as "Ghost", so the correct name for Vorbis II is Ghost...

I thought Ghost was Speex II, with the Vorbis I psymodel.


No, there was a seperate thing where JM borrowed some parts of the Vorbis psymodel to add to Speex, and we presented a paper about it.  Ghost has nothing to do with that.

Ghost is at the same point right now that Vorbis was in late 1998, early 1999.  There will be nothing anyone outside the org will see [well, care about] for the most optimistic minimum of a year.  Vorbis's failures in hardware adoption was not because the industry hated us.  There were several technical reasons Vorbis was hard to adopt for low end hardware manufacturers, and that's something we have to fix in time for Ghost.  The other reason for Ghost is that I don't want to keep tweaking the same old, I want to make a very big tech leap... the difference between replaying old levels over and over to squeeze out an extra second on the timer, and actually levelling up...

The primary reason it will not be named Vorbis II is because the codecs have virtually nothing in common.  I know that doesn't stop MPEG, I don't really care.

And for those who care, Sushivision is a visualization tool I built as part of the Ghost dev effort.  It's not meant for external consumption, at least not yet.  It's still cumbersome to set up.

(Oh hi, I'm back.  And it's nice to see you're still around Emmett.)

>This sadly means that there's apparently little time to e.g. review the AoTuV changes.

Then the reigns should be passed on to a suitale replacement (advertise for one), having someone who is effectively a spanner in the works (nothing against monty, but that is how it appears) is counter productive.


Well, in terms of Vorbis, that is what Aoyumi has done.  I offered making AoTuV an official Xiph project (or an officially sanctioned external project, or some sort of official status) and he balked at that.  I don't blame him.  He's doing his own thing, doing it well, and enjoying himself.  Why screw it up?

I've told anyone who's asked that AoTuV is the best of the Vorbis encoders out there that I know of.  There is nothing dodgy or unofficial about it.  I'm enjoying having a healthy third-party project advance the encoder.

As for me, I'm going to continue doing what I enjoy, and that's the codec research.  I have no interest in being an executive.  It doesn't make me happy.  Being an R&D engineer makes me happy.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: spoon on 2007-05-13 17:04:04
>AoTuV an official Xiph...balked at that

You just need a maintainer, take any stable releases from AoTuV and push them directly onto Xiph, with the correct compiles. Roberto practically does all that on rarewares, just needs doing on Xiph.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Fandango on 2007-05-13 17:48:22
The primary reason it will not be named Vorbis II is because the codecs have virtually nothing in common.  I know that doesn't stop MPEG, I don't really care.

"Common folks" will still call Ghost "teh .ogg" anyway, just like it is with Vorbis at the moment (although that has changed a bit over the last couple of years).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-05-18 15:41:30
An interesting new initiative: Play Ogg (http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-18 16:21:18
That's good news! Thanks for the link. I'll incorporate the nifty image into my sigs (in other forums, that is )

Edit:

Bleh, their link: http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg (http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg) consumes a lot of BBsig chara's.

I've shortened it to: http://tinyurl.com/2b7l5e (http://tinyurl.com/2b7l5e)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: SwiftBiscuit on 2007-05-18 20:09:23
I'll incorporate the nifty image into my sigs

It's a worthy effort, just a shame that they capitalised the G's.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Fandango on 2007-05-18 20:25:40
On the http://playogg.org/ (http://playogg.org/) page I see no links to Xiph.org under "What is Ogg?" at least Xiph.org should have been mentioned there. It solely links to the Videolan site... that's odd. Only under "resources" there's a small hint at the "inventors" and the press release has a link to the Xiph.org, too, saying that it's the place to get "technical details", gosh! Technical Details!  Besides I only see "donate buttons" for FSF at the playogg site...

Well, this is typical for the FSF, while I agree with their agenda in general, I doubt their publicity powers. Again it's "FSF here and FSF there and FSF everywhere. And oh, please use Ogg Vorbis, it's great."

IMHO http://vorbis.com/ (http://vorbis.com/) is better for someone new to Ogg Vorbis than http://playogg.org/ (http://playogg.org/)... ...and there's a donate button for Xiph.org at the Vorbis.com site, too.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Demetris on 2007-05-18 22:32:44
[..] IMHO http://vorbis.com/ (http://vorbis.com/) is better for someone new to Ogg Vorbis [...]

The FSF presentation seems good to me, but VLC may not be the best option, or maybe it should not be the only one mentioned...

So, I’ll be using the xiph fish with a link to vorbis.com :-) but there is something that I find confusing there:

http://vorbis.com/setup_windows/ (http://vorbis.com/setup_windows/)

DirectShow based players only need the Illiminable filters from above.

I think it should read:

Only DirectShow based players need the Illiminable filters from above.

Am I right, or is it my English?

Also, VLC is not listed on the above page (while it is listed on the Linux and OS X pages) :-|
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Fandango on 2007-05-19 00:30:30
So, I’ll be using the xiph fish with a link to vorbis.com :-) but there is something that I find confusing there:

http://vorbis.com/setup_windows/ (http://vorbis.com/setup_windows/)

DirectShow based players only need the Illiminable filters from above.

I think it should read:

Only DirectShow based players need the Illiminable filters from above.

Am I right, or is it my English?

Yeah, you are right about that sentence. They are also a bit focused on their special DS-filter. While I generally like it when people advocate Window's own Direct Show system for video playback instead of all-in-one players like VLC, I think it's a bit too far fetched for just an audio codec. But the DS-filter they're advocating here also supports the other Ogg-* multimedia codecs, maybe that's the motivation for promoting it there?

Also, VLC is not listed on the above page (while it is listed on the Linux and OS X pages) :-|
VLC really is not needed for Ogg Vorbis playback on Windows at all... there are better standalone players for that, like good old foobar2000. I'm sure that's the reason why it wasn't mentioned.

Still it's the misleading to say "DirectShow based players only need the Illiminable filters from above.", and then list non-Direct-Show players in the list below that sentence... 


Well, at least the Vorbis.com page does show you choices, although it is not free from flaws... which leads us to one of the very subjects of this topic again.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-05-19 04:22:43
Demetris> IMO both sentences are correct. It depends on what you want to say. But the original one makes more sense to me. It says in other words: "If you want to play Ogg files in a DirectShow based player, all you have to do is install Illiminable filters". But your sentence says: "Other then DS players don't need Illiminable filters to play Ogg files." This is not really true. English is not my native language, but this is how I feel the meaning of the 2 sentences. I hope I'm right.

According to VLC and why they chose it: VLC plays Ogg Vorbis/Theora/flac/Speex without the need to install anything else. And it has a plugin for Firefox. MPC can't even play Ogg Vorbis without a DS decoder (OggDS, Illiminable, ffdshow, CoreVorbis etc.) foobar2000 is my favorite player, but it is not a player for an average Joe. I would suggest him Winamp, but it is not opensource. AmaroK is great, but so far only available on Linux (might change with KDE 4 this autumn). So on Windows I would probably suggest MusikCube as the best opensource audio player. Later maybe SongBird might become interesting.

But Ogg is not just audio. Don't forget about Theora. If you want a rock solid player with complete Ogg support out of the box, I think VLC is the only choice.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-19 06:18:18
But leaving out Winamp, which is the de facto most widely used media player in the Windows world, don't really push the popularity of Ogg Vorbis. IMO people will think, "Gosh, why must I install something else?" Just merely pointing out that Winamp supports Ogg Vorbis will make people think, "Oh? Winamp supports Ogg Vorbis? Gee, I should check this out."

Just my $0.02.

Edit: Soooo... what site should I link my sig-button to? playogg.org? or vorbis.com?
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: jorsol on 2007-05-19 06:59:14
I think that they choose VLC for various reasons... and all are perfectly valid for me...

1) It's free software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)... <-- Is promoted by the FSF...
2) It's GPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). <-- Again a plus for the FSF.
3) It's cross-platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform). <--Very important, its where many players fail.
4) It support Ogg/Vorbis/Theora out-of-box (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-Of-Box_Experience). <-- No need additional codecs for lazy users, no configuration only open and play.
5) It's a rock solid player. <-- like vlada said.
6) It have a Firefox -and IE- plug in (how many players have this). <-- Not critical but a plus...

Well these are just a few... and probably this is the only player that have all this requirements.

Maybe in MS Windows we have better choices like illiminable oggcodecs (or HaaliSplitter + ffdshow), using your favorite DS player... in MacOS X there is XiphQT (http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/) (I'm not sure how stable/good is)... in GNU/Linux there is support out-of-the box in all mayor distributions...

Don't start to criticize, why they don't put Winamp, foobar2000, WMP, AmaroK, X, Y, Z player!!!! they only put the only player that have all the requirements above. Winamp need additional codecs if you want to play Theora (and is not free software), foobar2000 don't even play video (and is not free software), WMP needs ALL the necessary codecs installed (and is not free software)... Every other player fails at least in one point of the above... I mean an audio-only player is not the best option, there is theora...

It's a Free Software Foundation campaign... it have a few days released and it's not perfect... they don't promote Theora or even mention it, but I'm sure that they want to promote Theora too (in the test use an Ogg Theora+Vorbis)... maybe they need a little more (professional) help to get the campaign fully working.

Quote
...MPC can't even play Ogg Vorbis without a DS decoder...
MPC (Media Player Classic) can play Ogg Vorbis out-of-box in the latest version (probably a few months ago)...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-19 07:44:49
Okay, you have a point there, jorsol.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: PatchWorKs on 2007-05-19 08:50:17
I still remember this one (http://www.marevalo.net/OggLogos/) too...

In my opinion vorbis.com needs a good CMS !!!
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Fandango on 2007-05-19 17:10:02
Okay, you have a point there, jorsol.

Very good one actually. Of course, they won't mention software that is not "free". How could I forget that... 

Still a few more hints at Xiph.org (they need money from donation, too) would have been polite.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-05-19 18:15:35
Quote
...MPC can't even play Ogg Vorbis without a DS decoder...
MPC (Media Player Classic) can play Ogg Vorbis out-of-box in the latest version (probably a few months ago)...


I'm not 100% sure, but I think the last official version (6.4.9.0) doesn't support Vorbis. You're of course right, the latest builds support Vorbis.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Demetris on 2007-05-19 21:52:34
http://oggvorbis.fc2web.com/link.html (http://oggvorbis.fc2web.com/link.html)

It has two nice buttons to use for links to vorbis.com. :-)

88x31
(http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/9711/oggmura1zw2.png)

200x40
(http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/1332/oggmura2fy0.png)

What do they say? Is this Japanese? I think I’m going to use them anyway. :-)

I also found some 80x15 badges here:

http://www.zwahlendesign.ch/en/node/19 (http://www.zwahlendesign.ch/en/node/19)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Enig123 on 2007-05-20 01:13:57
Ogg community it says. Although I know little Japanese, Chinese character it is.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: haregoo on 2007-05-20 03:08:06
What do they say? Is this Japanese? I think I’m going to use them anyway. :-)

It says Ogg Village and it's the logo of www3.to/oggv, which is supposed to link that site.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Demetris on 2007-05-20 13:07:51
Enig123 and haregoo, thanks for the answers! :-)

I wish xiph offered some 88x31 buttons to link to their site. These Japanese buttons are the only ones I liked after a quick search, but maybe it is not perfectly right to use them for linking to vorbis.com...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Nick E on 2007-05-20 17:43:13
That's good news! Thanks for the link. I'll incorporate the nifty image into my sigs (in other forums, that is )

Edit:

Bleh, their link: http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg (http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg) consumes a lot of BBsig chara's.

I've shortened it to: http://tinyurl.com/2b7l5e (http://tinyurl.com/2b7l5e)


*Sigh*

What a pig's ear of a page! I've no right to complain, since I don't use the format (although I have in the past), and was only reading all the current HA threads out of curiosity. But not only does the page look horrible it invokes horizontal scrolling - which is a big no-no in web design. Or at any rate it does in my browser, perhaps not in all. Perhaps it's a coding error - the page doesn't validate (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fsf.org%2Fresources%2Fformats%2Fplayogg&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&verbose=1).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-21 07:23:56
What a pig's ear of a page! I've no right to complain, since I don't use the format (although I have in the past), and was only reading all the current HA threads out of curiosity. But not only does the page look horrible it invokes horizontal scrolling - which is a big no-no in web design. Or at any rate it does in my browser, perhaps not in all. Perhaps it's a coding error - the page doesn't validate (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fsf.org%2Fresources%2Fformats%2Fplayogg&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&verbose=1).
Eh? It doesn't scroll horizontally on me (FX 2.0.0.3, 1024x68).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-05-21 18:58:47
Nick E
There are some IE compatibility hacks in the page. But it probably doesn't work. But I think the suolution is to use a proper browser.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-22 07:23:57
... and the "Play Ogg" campaign is now made mainstream by LifeHacker:

http://lifehacker.com/software/digital-mus...rbis-262021.php (http://lifehacker.com/software/digital-music/take-your-music-open+source-with-ogg-vorbis-262021.php)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: sonytp50 on 2007-05-22 10:44:06
But leaving out Winamp, which is the de facto most widely used media player in the Windows world, don't really push the popularity of Ogg Vorbis.

"Oh? Winamp supports Ogg Vorbis? Gee, I should check this out."


Only problem: The current WinampLite versions do not play
Ogg right out of the box - you have to do a full install (that
also installs loads of other useless things) to get it to play
vorbis.

Also it seems that people who care about music enough to install Winamp
are not the people who still need to hear about ogg for the first time.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: tempnegro on 2007-05-23 02:03:18
could of swore I had a post in here
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-23 19:32:43
See this:

Wired has picked up on the Play Ogg initiative. (http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/05/playogg)

Also:

Wired's analysis on the effect of recently-litigated MP3 patents. (http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/02/72785)
Quote
It's hard to say which companies will be affected by Thursday's award. Those wishing to use MP3 have traditionally been subject to two sets of rules for using the codec: one for encoding, and another for playback. If the two patents upheld by the jury today apply only to products that encode audio into MP3s, the ruling would affect only companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and others offering software that lets consumers make their own MP3 files.

If they cover playback too, every company involved even tangentially with MP3 stands to lose big. Microsoft's licensing bill for Thomson/Fraunhofer was only $16 million -- about 1 percent of what it now owes Alcatel-Lucent. A significant number of the companies who offer MP3 encoders and/or players could face a similar judgment, with many being driven out of business.


Edit: The first article above does a good job trying to explain Ogg Vorbis and help people play it.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: gameplaya15143 on 2007-05-23 20:18:32
...Winamp need additional codecs if you want to play Theora (and is not free software), foobar2000 don't even play video (and is not free software), WMP needs ALL the necessary codecs installed (and is not free software)...
  Are you crazy?  All of those are free (not necessarily open source though) and Illiminable's Oggcodecs are free (which are needed to add ogg/theora support into both winamp/wmp).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Fandango on 2007-05-23 23:12:21
Wired's analysis on the effect of recently-litigated MP3 patents. (http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/02/72785)
Quote
It's hard to say which companies will be affected by Thursday's award. Those wishing to use MP3 have traditionally been subject to two sets of rules for using the codec: one for encoding, and another for playback. If the two patents upheld by the jury today apply only to products that encode audio into MP3s, the ruling would affect only companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and others offering software that lets consumers make their own MP3 files.

If they cover playback too, every company involved even tangentially with MP3 stands to lose big. Microsoft's licensing bill for Thomson/Fraunhofer was only $16 million -- about 1 percent of what it now owes Alcatel-Lucent. A significant number of the companies who offer MP3 encoders and/or players could face a similar judgment, with many being driven out of business.

Uhm, I believe the least Alcatel-Lucent and Fraunhofer want is to scare every single company who uses MP3 in their products away from... using MP3. So it's utterly unrealistic that we will see a major shift from MP3 to, e.g. Ogg Vorbis. Microsoft is an extreme example, but it's an exception, because they have extremely huge amounts of cash.

What Alcatel-Lucent wants is making a profit out of (modest) fees from their patents and not destroying this opportunity at all, be it by bludgening everyone down who can't or isn't willing to pay or by scaring them off to another codec. Moreover I doubt that neither single persons nor non-profit projects like LAME will be charged for fees.

Of course, in case companies who'll face the possibility of paying will think twice whether it is worth it to stick with a MP3 playback and recording functionality in their products, but I'm sure that it will still pay out to keep MP3 support despite the fees because it is and will be a wide-spread format - people won't delete their old MP3s because more and more new products don't support it anymore, in fact they will rather avoid buying those products.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vlada on 2007-05-24 10:59:00
Also it seems that people who care about music enough to install Winamp
are not the people who still need to hear about ogg for the first time.


I know plenty of people who are using Winamp, but never heard about Ogg Vorbis. They only know MP3.

gameplaya15143
Do not confuse free (opensource) and freeware software.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: ckjnigel on 2007-05-24 16:26:02
Well, most people don't know about VBR and why it's desirable. (Or, why transcoding from *.mp3 to *.ogg isn't good!)
I'm impressed by how many mobile players support Ogg Vorbis.  But, questions I see in product support forums show that few are aware of why and how *.ogg files are better. Yes, I point people, but I doubt many want to mess with EAC, foobar2000 and command lines.
I think that encoding speed (e.g., Blacksword) and more fi for your space are potent selling points. But, what's needed is a costless, super-simple rip-encoder that *.ogg fans can promote on forum boards such as for iRiver and Meizu.
I think my greatest disappointment is that Nokia's N800 doesn't provide straight-from-the-box *.ogg support.
Addendum: The most effective way to promote would be to take some LC-AAC songs from the iTunes store and show what size *.ogg files are comparable in quality.  But, I know that HA's stringent testing guidelines make that a non-trivial exercise.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-25 09:23:56
Well, most people don't know about VBR and why it's desirable. (Or, why transcoding from *.mp3 to *.ogg isn't good!)

I'm impressed by how many mobile players support Ogg Vorbis.  But, questions I see in product support forums show that few are aware of why and how *.ogg files are better. Yes, I point people, but I doubt many want to mess with EAC, foobar2000 and command lines.

I think that encoding speed (e.g., Blacksword) and more fi for your space are potent selling points. But, what's needed is a costless, super-simple rip-encoder that *.ogg fans can promote on forum boards such as for iRiver and Meizu.
You can point them to AudioGrabber.

I think my greatest disappointment is that Nokia's N800 doesn't provide straight-from-the-box *.ogg support.
My grief, too.

Addendum: The most effective way to promote would be to take some LC-AAC songs from the iTunes store and show what size *.ogg files are comparable in quality.  But, I know that HA's stringent testing guidelines make that a non-trivial exercise.
For the rest of the world that's not members of HA, I don't think HA's TOS applies
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: askoff on 2007-05-25 11:19:30
I think that Vorbis has quite good support already and if you really want to use it, you can just by checkig before what you buy. I think it's not a good idea to force everyone to use it because most of the people doesn't care how much better it is and how many songs more they can fit in their players. People use what they get and what they have and the songs in MP3 format are easiest to find.
Those people who does care about these little things like sound quality and efficiency, they don't have to use MP3.
Worst thing is that it only takes one MP3 player in house to keep the songs in MP3 format. (And in my case WavPack...)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Spikey on 2007-05-26 04:29:58
Well, for my money, I find the 'ease of encoding' argument an interesting one.

I'm no expert in these matters, I'm a member of HA to learn more and understand more, not dole out advice.

But- in my experiences, I find popular MP3 encoding programs such as 'LAME' to be convoluted and confusing- whereas using the OggDropXPd Lancer build is damned easy- set to whatever quality you want and drag and drop! (And set tags and whatever else you want of course.)

Obviously, as was said in this thread or another (which linked to this thread) most people simply hit 'rip' in their ripper or player (which does rips) of choice. But as has been covered in this thread, Vorbis isn't currently used amongst such 'average' users, but rather more sophisticated ones.

So I think saying to such users, use Lancer build, and use WinAmp with a codec you may/may not need to download, isn't asking much of such users, if Vorbis use/ease of use (or at least, understanding) is our desire here.


Incidentally, hasn't some HA users recently expressed a lack of ability to distinguish between Vorbis and MP3 (and probably other codecs like AAC) at bitrates of around 128 kbps? I would have thought that was a barrier to taking up Vorbis, if most 'audiophiles' or audio enthusiasts can't even ABX the difference at such common (dare I say, low) bitrates.
If average users who probably use 128 or better kbps MP3 files, you get my point- saying "Vorbis doesn't really sound different, but you should use it", plus asking to use different software, isn't a very enticing argument.

Note that that's not my opinion, I use Vorbis for several reasons (quality, filesize, open source/free, easier than LAME, and so on). But I run a music website, and if a forum member puts that to me (the question that doesn't MP3 and Ogg sound about the same as most commonly used bitrates)- I can really only say "Yeah, if that works for you, that's great", or "Yeah, there really isn't much difference". Not really satisfactory answers, but I'm not sure what else to say without getting into codec wars.

- Spike
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: vinnie97 on 2007-05-26 11:21:11
If average users who probably use 128 or better kbps MP3 files, you get my point- saying "Vorbis doesn't really sound different, but you should use it", plus asking to use different software, isn't a very enticing argument.

It is at this point that you lower the bitrate to 80 kbps without telling them and get their assessment of the SQ.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Junon on 2007-05-26 15:07:11
Incidentally, hasn't some HA users recently expressed a lack of ability to distinguish between Vorbis and MP3 (and probably other codecs like AAC) at bitrates of around 128 kbps? I would have thought that was a barrier to taking up Vorbis, if most 'audiophiles' or audio enthusiasts can't even ABX the difference at such common (dare I say, low) bitrates.
If average users who probably use 128 or better kbps MP3 files, you get my point- saying "Vorbis doesn't really sound different, but you should use it", plus asking to use different software, isn't a very enticing argument.

Well, the 2005 multiformat test concluded that users actually weren't able to distinguish between Vorbis and MP3 at a VBR average of around 128 kbit/s. Since the test was carried out in this community it's safe to say that even a lot of audiophiles actually fail at ABXing the differences.

And that leads to the "barrier" you described: There does seem to exist a psychological barrier that prevents people from testing bitrates below the 128 kbit/s threshold, simply because they're aware of the often poorly encoded 128 kbit/s MP3 material found in the internet. A good example for this claim is this quote (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=51289):
Quote
But I cant believe that 128kbit files are absolutely transparent?

Be Positive obviously often had the pleasure of listening to non-transparent 128 kbit/s MP3s, which has resulted in the conclusion that this bitrate isn't adequate for transparent listening experiences. From a technical point of view this argument doesn't make any sense for different encoders, since all of them make use of their own algorithms to create the audio data. This is especially valid for entirely different formats, like MP3 vs. Vorbis in this case, but how should you explain that to the technically uninterested, average user? She/He will keep encoding to what she/he already knows about, and this will most likely lead to 128-192 kbit/s files. At these bitrates Vorbis doesn't provide any serious benefits compared to MP3 for the majority of listeners, rather disadvantages due to less compatibility, therefore the format remains uninteresting for them.

I even doubt Joe Public would actually want to seriously test ~96 kbit/s AAC/Vorbis vs. 128 kbit/s MP3 due to this psychological reason. He'd most likely become victim of a placebo effect when listening to the AAC/Vorbis encoding, simply because he knows that the bitrate is lower. And from my own past experiences (prior to regularly reading these forums) I can tell that the necessary blind listening tests aren't carried out by the average user. She/He most likely just adds both test files to the audio player's playlist and listens a bit to them, being full aware of which file represents which codec. And this, of course, can't lead to an objective result.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: MedO on 2007-05-27 15:33:59
He'd most likely become victim of a placebo effect when listening to the AAC/Vorbis encoding, simply because he knows that the bitrate is lower.


This goes so far that many people seem to think that bitrate is actually the same as sound quality. A friend once told me that he had found a new format (don't remember which one it was) that produced "smaller files than mp3 at the same bitrate" (not an exact quote), and I think someone posted in this forum, who was concerned because his losslessly compressed files had a lower bitrate than the original wav.

So maybe it would actually be better not to talk about bitrate at all when telling uninformed people about codecs different from mp3, but instead about file size, which is something people might understand better.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-27 17:06:41
Just an anecdote from me:

People keep asking me to copy them nice-sounding albums from Jamendo. I *did* point them to the site, but my office's broadband connection always gives me result and fast. So they rely on me.

Sooooo...

I only give them the .ogg files. Transcoded to a lower bitrate
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: Mercurio on 2007-05-28 11:22:52
Quote
I think my greatest disappointment is that Nokia's N800 doesn't provide straight-from-the-box *.ogg support.


I knew this too and I was disappointed too.
Since the N800 is built on an opensource platform, it seems like they almost *removed* it purposely!

edit:I've read something on www.maemo.org. Maybe it is not so simple, but still not clear to me.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-28 12:34:39
Quote
I think my greatest disappointment is that Nokia's N800 doesn't provide straight-from-the-box *.ogg support.
I knew this too and I was disappointed too.
Since the N800 is built on an opensource platform, it seems like they almost *removed* it purposely!
Is there a way for us to 'petition' Nokia?
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: gottkaiser on 2007-05-28 12:45:46
Is there a way for us to 'petition' Nokia?


That sounds like a good idea. I would really like Nokia to support OGG Vorbis.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-28 13:02:56
Is there a way for us to 'petition' Nokia?
That sounds like a good idea. I would really like Nokia to support OGG Vorbis.
If you, or anyone else, finds how, then please do post here. I'll gladly donate some of my time to join a petition.

And not only Nokia. Also Sony-Ericsson (although I'm not sure they'll relent -- they are part Sony), Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc.

Heck. Samsung already make Ogg-playing DAP's. Why don't their phones play ogg? And LG is also a Korean company -- seems Koreans and Japanese are really 'into' ogg. So...
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-29 10:18:15
Why Audio Format Matters (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-audio-format-matters.html)
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: eofor on 2007-05-29 10:50:52
Is there a way for us to 'petition' Nokia?
That sounds like a good idea. I would really like Nokia to support OGG Vorbis.
If you, or anyone else, finds how, then please do post here. I'll gladly donate some of my time to join a petition.

And not only Nokia. Also Sony-Ericsson (although I'm not sure they'll relent -- they are part Sony), Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc.

Heck. Samsung already make Ogg-playing DAP's. Why don't their phones play ogg? And LG is also a Korean company -- seems Koreans and Japanese are really 'into' ogg. So...


I have a Nokia phone (7710, Symbian S90) with Ogg playing software (OggPlay). I initially loved the fact that I could get twice as much music on the memory card by using Ogg @ 64kbps. The experience compared to mp3 however was not good at all, cpu loads are so high that the phone becomes unresponsive and the battery drains really, really quickly. Unless there's an efficient Ogg codec for these mobile platforms (like you can license from the big boys cheaply for WMA/MP3/AAC), phone manufacturers will not push Ogg, because nobody wants to advertise a music phone that lasts less than 4 hours playing the format. Also, encoding (using standard WinAmp, which uses an up-to-date Lancer build) is painfully slow compared to LAME. That's not meant as a attack on OGG as a format, but more as a reminder that building a great psymodel, defining robust specs and having impeccable "free software" credentials is not enough - for it to be a success as a commercial product, you need to provide OEMs with easy and fast implementations.

Microsoft understands this - even when WMA is even less popular than OGG and nobody likes MS to begin with, they provide such easy to implement and efficient decoders and simple, no-hassle licenses for OEMs that even every two-bit Chinese backstreet workshop implements it.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: bawjaws on 2007-05-29 12:00:25
I don't know if this has been mentioned already but it looks quite likely that at least Mozilla and Opera will support  Ogg Theora and Vorbis for the suggest "audio" and "video" tags in HTML5.

Apple's pushing for AAC/H.264 and it might turn out that the HTML5 standard doesn't specify a codec. But if they also package up a drop in replacement for older/non-conforming browsers (for example, using the Cortado Java Applets) then this could be a real goer. (Part of the idea of HTML5 is to remain backwards compatible with IE as much as possible, even if it means using fancey javascript tricks to patch up the differences for non-compliant browsers. I've never heard them promote Java as a way of doing this but i think it makes sense in the realm of video and audio).

That would mean native support on Mozilla and derivatives, Opera (including probably the Wii, maybe the Nintendo DS and several smart phones). It's interesting to note that the Wii browser only supports Flash 7 because Adobe doesn't provide a newer SDK, so only Adobe's supported platforms get the newer code.

I'd assume that Apple would use Quicktime so Ogg support should be a plugin away.

Wikipedia's already signed up to use the format regardless. I'd imagine the BBC and other national broadcast types would jump at the chance to use a real browser standard rather that a mishmash of Real/WMA/Quicktime.

One of the Google employees that works on HTML5 seemed to be hinting that Youtube would switch too.

Flash video came from nowhere because it filled a real need, I can see Ogg Theora doing the same, and bringing Ogg Vorbis support with it.

links:

The HTML5 draft
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video0 (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video0)
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#audio0 (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#audio0)

A test build of Opera with Theora/Vorbis support:
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/video...lgpl_signed.exe (http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/video/op950_8762_video_repack_with_lgpl_signed.exe)

Some sample sites (scroll down to "A call for video on the web":
http://labs.opera.com/ (http://labs.opera.com/)

Screencast of the Mozilla support:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/05/suppo...element-in.html (http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/05/support-for-html-video-element-in.html)

Cortado applets:
http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/ (http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/)

This may not translate into total dominance of mp3, but it looks like Ogg may carve itself a pretty big niche if this all goes according to plan.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: eofor on 2007-05-29 12:45:13
If Ogg Vorbis/Theora goes into HTML 5, that means that the "no patents" claim will finally be tested! It's one thing for a possible patent holder to tolerate a niche format used mainly by OS-programs with no money, it's another thing to have it in the future standard of the whole web.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: TREX6662k6 on 2007-05-29 12:59:16
lol, no patents? I find that hard to imagine especially in today's world where you can patent something so general and blunt then sue absolutely everyone for every penny.

I think I first found out about OGG when I noticed that unreal tournament 2003 was using some obscure audio format.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: bawjaws on 2007-05-29 13:18:51
Theora *is* patented. Google or Wikipedia for more if you're interested.

Note that there's no real threat from competitors when it comes to patents. It's really not in their own self-interest  to start something like that. They might make vague threats but nothing more.

Little tiny companies who have nothing but slightly iffy patents. They're a threat. But more to Microsoft than anyone else, cos they've got all the money.

And this is relevant too:

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy/ (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy/)

Basically, if you're taking part in the process then you've got to show your hand with respect to patents that cover the standard.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: eofor on 2007-05-29 15:26:17
Theora *is* patented. Google or Wikipedia for more if you're interested.

Note that there's no real threat from competitors when it comes to patents. It's really not in their own self-interest  to start something like that. They might make vague threats but nothing more.

Little tiny companies who have nothing but slightly iffy patents. They're a threat. But more to Microsoft than anyone else, cos they've got all the money.


So, as soon as Microsoft or Apple makes a HTML 5 compliant browser they'll be sued. Great. Now that's going to help getting it into the specs.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: bawjaws on 2007-05-29 16:10:41
It can't get into the spec if the W3C is aware of any patent risk. Anyone who signs up to the W3C has to say if they've got any patents on the stuff.

So if it gets into the standard then any legal action is going to be small irrelevant patent trolls versus everybody who makes money from the web. You know no big company can sue because they'll be also infringing on literally hundreds of patents owned by the various companies implementing the standard.

Sometimes these folk win (see Eolas vs. Microsoft) but then you can work round the patent and life goes on. I'm not saying it's a great system (it's not) but dodgy patents aren't quite as chilling on innovation and adoption of open source and open standards as you'd imagine from reading these forums.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: maikmerten on 2007-05-29 18:18:15
Theora *is* patented.


Yup. The interesting thing is that all those patents come with a free license for use with Theora. Just wanted to add this for those that don't want to follow the Wikipedia link.

Any IP risks that Ogg Theora/Vorbis may have are just as present for the MPEG formats, of course. See Alcatel claiming patents on MP3. The whole patent system is broken and far outlived it's usability (it was a good idea to make sure fancy new steam engine developments go public - but nowadays most companies just ignore them and hope nobody will notice or that they can license the needed patents if the need arises).
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: PatchWorKs on 2007-05-30 08:18:56
Theora *is* patented. Google or Wikipedia for more if you're interested.


Switch to Dirac (http://dirac.sourceforge.net/), then ! 
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: bawjaws on 2007-05-30 10:36:51
Dirac is one of the other options being considered for HTML5. This post from the BBC has some updates:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-w...rch/010417.html (http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-March/010417.html)

If it does get chosen then it'll almost certainly be Dirac in the Ogg container, with Vorbis for audio, which still means a big win for the Xiph family of codecs.

On the topic of patents though, I'd be very much surprised if the BBC wasn't patenting any innovative parts of Dirac, though obviously they'd need to freely grant those patents in the same way that Theora has in order for it to become a free and open standard.
Title: What is going on with Vorbis? (or Xiph overall)
Post by: pepoluan on 2007-05-30 11:06:37
I have a Nokia phone (7710, Symbian S90) with Ogg playing software (OggPlay). I initially loved the fact that I could get twice as much music on the memory card by using Ogg @ 64kbps. The experience compared to mp3 however was not good at all, cpu loads are so high that the phone becomes unresponsive and the battery drains really, really quickly. Unless there's an efficient Ogg codec for these mobile platforms (like you can license from the big boys cheaply for WMA/MP3/AAC), phone manufacturers will not push Ogg, because nobody wants to advertise a music phone that lasts less than 4 hours playing the format.
This actually mirrors the situation of Rockbox consuming power far greater than iPod's standard firmware.

Someone said that it's not the codec's fault, it's the player's 'fault', i.e. the player's maker hasn't figured out how to turn of nonessential things in the hardware.

Also, encoding (using standard WinAmp, which uses an up-to-date Lancer build) is painfully slow compared to LAME. That's not meant as a attack on OGG as a format, but more as a reminder that building a great psymodel, defining robust specs and having impeccable "free software" credentials is not enough - for it to be a success as a commercial product, you need to provide OEMs with easy and fast implementations.
For me, I don't find Lancer to be far slower than LAME. aoTuV's standard build *is* a heck slower than LAME, but not Lancer.

Anyways, if the average user is given the option of:
- Fast encoding, but less music
- Slower encoding, but more music

I believe they will opt for the latter.

Microsoft understands this - even when WMA is even less popular than OGG and nobody likes MS to begin with, they provide such easy to implement and efficient decoders and simple, no-hassle licenses for OEMs that even every two-bit Chinese backstreet workshop implements it.
Ogg Vorbis has a simpler no-hassle license: It's public domain.