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Topic: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus? (Read 77787 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #25
— Vorbis supports high sample rates, up to 192kHz.
— Vorbis has a highly optimized (in terms of speed) encoder Lancer.
— It is just more popular, more hardware and software support it.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #26
— Vorbis supports high sample rates, up to 192kHz.
And ultrasonic frequencies really only matter in mastering stages, if at all, and you wouldn't be using lossy formats there.
— Vorbis has a highly optimized (in terms of speed) encoder Lancer.
I can imagine this may be useful if you're performing a lot of encoding at many times real time, say, batch encoding at speeds faster than most solid state drives can read the raw PCM samples at. Also, mainline and forks have significantly improved quality and speed since 2010, which appears to be when that page snapshot is from.
— It is just more popular, more hardware and software support it.
I will give you that, but support will happen in the future. There's already the huge Google push behind YouTube, which uses Opus everywhere as its highest quality or preferred format.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #27
I will give you that, but support will happen in the future. There's already the huge Google push behind YouTube, which uses Opus everywhere as its highest quality or preferred format.
Not all YouTube videos have an Opus track available.
Google also made bold claims in the past about replacing h264 by WebM & VP8 everywhere and none of that happened.
Opus 96 kb/s (Android) / Vorbis -q5 (PC) / WavPack -hhx6m (Archive)

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #28
— Vorbis supports high sample rates, up to 192kHz.
— Vorbis has a highly optimized (in terms of speed) encoder Lancer.
— It is just more popular, more hardware and software support it.

But will it blend?!

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #29
Google also made bold claims in the past about replacing h264 by WebM & VP8 everywhere and none of that happened.

YouTube only uses VP8 and Vorbis on old videos with a low amount of views.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #30
I will give you that, but support will happen in the future. There's already the huge Google push behind YouTube, which uses Opus everywhere as its highest quality or preferred format.
Not all YouTube videos have an Opus track available.
Google also made bold claims in the past about replacing h264 by WebM & VP8 everywhere and none of that happened.

They actually did use VP8 for a while, but have since switched youtube over to VP9 on browsers that support it.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #31
That might be true in theory, but last time I checked Vorbis was still the only lossy codec that passed a problematic gapless test.

Where is the test you're referring to?

...it still occasionally stumbles over killer samples and this doesn't seem to be entirely cured at any bitrate.

Can you provide such samples?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #32
I recently ripped some CDs to Ogg Vorbis, using quality 6 (the quality recommended on their website for near cd quality and "lossless stereo). I found the mids to trebles to be over amplified. This resulted in audio characteristics such as snares and claps being disproportionately LOUD, and songs just generally sounding harsh.

Has anyone else found this with Ogg Vorbis?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #33
Which encoder did you use?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #34
I recently ripped some CDs to Ogg Vorbis, using quality 6 (the quality recommended on their website for near cd quality and "lossless stereo). I found the mids to trebles to be over amplified. This resulted in audio characteristics such as snares and claps being disproportionately LOUD, and songs just generally sounding harsh.

Has anyone else found this with Ogg Vorbis?

Did you try and ABX to rule out observational bias?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #35
I will give you that, but support will happen in the future. There's already the huge Google push behind YouTube, which uses Opus everywhere as its highest quality or preferred format.
Not all YouTube videos have an Opus track available.
Google also made bold claims in the past about replacing h264 by WebM & VP8 everywhere and none of that happened.
Last time I checked, the current target is AV1 to be the de-facto standard codec for video in Youtube. However, re-encoding old videos into newer lossy codecs makes no sense, since that would only reduce quality further. It's easier to keep the old stuff and only re-encode if it is absolutely imperative (like preview-size, etc) and where quality absolutely isn't the issue.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #36
I recently ripped some CDs to Ogg Vorbis, using quality 6 (the quality recommended on their website for near cd quality and "lossless stereo). I found the mids to trebles to be over amplified. This resulted in audio characteristics such as snares and claps being disproportionately LOUD, and songs just generally sounding harsh.

Has anyone else found this with Ogg Vorbis?

That doesn't seem to be a problem added by Vorbis. At much, it sounds as if you got your hands on a CD that has pre-emphasis, and as such, it needs to be de-emphasized first.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #37
Last time I checked, the current target is AV1 to be the de-facto standard codec for video in Youtube. However, re-encoding old videos into newer lossy codecs makes no sense, since that would only reduce quality further. It's easier to keep the old stuff and only re-encode if it is absolutely imperative (like preview-size, etc) and where quality absolutely isn't the issue.
Google won't transcode from VP9 to AV1.
Google keeps original versions of uploaded videos on Youtube.   

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #38
Last time I checked, the current target is AV1 to be the de-facto standard codec for video in Youtube. However, re-encoding old videos into newer lossy codecs makes no sense, since that would only reduce quality further. It's easier to keep the old stuff and only re-encode if it is absolutely imperative (like preview-size, etc) and where quality absolutely isn't the issue.
Google won't transcode from VP9 to AV1.
Google keeps original versions of uploaded videos on Youtube.   
Isn't that what I've said?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #39
Not sure.

What I mean is that Google can easily encode  ALL videos to AV1 because they have an original  sources (not VP9 encoded video which streamed on Youtube)  which were uploaded by users.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #40
Hi.  I was having some trouble getting results from Opus at maximum quality, when encoding https://slugdge.bandcamp.com/track/spore-ensemble from FLAC.    This track in particular has heavy use of reverb at the 5:50 mark, and Opus was just doing it wrong.  Ogg wasn't much better until I used:

oggenc -q 10 --advanced-encode-option disable_coupling

the disable_coupling seemed to fix the loss in spatial effects that I was getting when not using that oggenc option.    I believe it's similar to turning off "Joint Stereo"

I'm pretty happy with the resulting ogg file, 27M from a 95M FLAC.  I am definitely recommending trying those options if you have an troublesome metal song that seems substandard with the Opus codec.    I didn't try Wavpack.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #41
[...] oggenc -q 10 [...]
really, q10 ? ~450kbps and p/acoustic fix for lossy? why? for what?
[...] I didn't try Wavpack.
hybride? someone has been very bad :P ... try it immediately! and don`t forget lossywav. or, if you so love lossy, musepack.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #42
FWIW, Google considers Ogg Vorbis to be deprecated. I was reading a bug report from a while back that got closed WONTFIX with this comment.

Unfortunately, they refuse to implement proper support for Opus in the system codecs, so using it properly requires bringing in something like VLC.

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.

Chris Montgomery of Xiph.org claimed that the uber conservative nature of reference is because AoTuv had a few bugs when it was last merged and he didn't want to deal with regressions.

As is usual with the Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers software development model, instead of improving Vorbis, they created something new and incompatible instead.

Even in Free Software, support for Opus isn't very good in some cases. Like some tagging software.

So they've created a mess of codecs and forked software, half-baked implementations, and varying degrees of compatibility all around when they could have just left things alone and worked on what already existed.

Perhaps it can be argued that at ridiculously low bitrates, Opus competes well against even AoTuv, but the fact remains that this would have been more useful in 1999 (when MP3 was widely used and didn't sound good at any reasonable bitrate) than 2019. :)

Also interesting is that the last codec listening test, which was five years ago, the only format that had a "stumble over and die" sample in the ~96 kbps realm was Apple's AAC.

 

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #43
I am a Vorbis user, and I will stay that way. I am happy that someone did an accurate description what I always thought of Chris Montgomery and co. I am very resentful for Monty's inactivity to merge or at least consider and also to promote and appreciate Aoyoume. As an engineer I know that hard to get the format right, yet, a real engineer also gets the most of the constraints of the format once it is out there. I find him failing in that. Starting yet another codec shows no commitment and discipline, but just working at whim. I am sure soon Opus will be left behind and something else comes.

Being at  Xiph the goal is not just to pollute the world with codecs, but to marketing them, work with companies and making the format widespread.  I look up to Josh Coalson as he has achieved that. I am sure he worked a lot in the background with mp3 player hw manufacturers and even with Xiph so that FLAC became so ubiquitous.

Albeit I stick with Vorbis Aotuv as it is truly gapless, high quality, easy tagging, and good support, but never consider Opus, and I was fortunate to bank on H.264 and now H.265 in video (and AAC for movie soundtracks) rather than VP8/9 and now AV1 (or whatever we call it) as Google comes across just like Monty and co. No proper specs, no working with HW companies. Just rolling out endless undocumented, half-baked stuff. No thanks.

Triza

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #44
Opus is obviously better but I still use Vorbis (lateset aotuv q4) on my Rockboxed Sansa devices because it's a lot easier on software decoding.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #45
I am a Vorbis user, and I will stay that way. I am happy that someone did an accurate description what I always thought of Chris Montgomery and co. I am very resentful for Monty's inactivity to merge or at least consider and also to promote and appreciate Aoyoume. As an engineer I know that hard to get the format right, yet, a real engineer also gets the most of the constraints of the format once it is out there. I find him failing in that. Starting yet another codec shows no commitment and discipline, but just working at whim. I am sure soon Opus will be left behind and something else comes.

Being at  Xiph the goal is not just to pollute the world with codecs, but to marketing them, work with companies and making the format widespread.  I look up to Josh Coalson as he has achieved that. I am sure he worked a lot in the background with mp3 player hw manufacturers and even with Xiph so that FLAC became so ubiquitous.

Albeit I stick with Vorbis Aotuv as it is truly gapless, high quality, easy tagging, and good support, but never consider Opus, and I was fortunate to bank on H.264 and now H.265 in video (and AAC for movie soundtracks) rather than VP8/9 and now AV1 (or whatever we call it) as Google comes across just like Monty and co. No proper specs, no working with HW companies. Just rolling out endless undocumented, half-baked stuff. No thanks.

Triza

About the only codec that seems safe from being dumped whenever they want to make something "better" is FLAC, because it's lossless and mature and probably isn't going anywhere.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of video codecs is worse than it is with audio codecs. The problem is compounded by the fact that whenever the MPEG people produce something, it's entirely restricted and then the Free Software side has to figure out something that is similar. But while there have been dramatic improvements between generations of _video_ codecs, this is simply not the case with audio.

Even MP3 basically works fine now, and I would argue, is more safe from being dropped from the "MUST" support in the Android documentation than anything else, except AAC. When Google is finished with Vorbis for their purposes, I wouldn't be shocked if they dropped it from MUST or even SHOULD and then you're back to needing VLC just like you currently do with Opus. :)

As we've seen from Google's behavior, they drop about one of their own products every couple of weeks, even after millions of people depend on it. Why would anything be safe? :P

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #46
Opus is obviously better but I still use Vorbis (lateset aotuv q4) on my Rockboxed Sansa devices because it's a lot easier on software decoding.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with current Sansa devices.

1. Rockbox is obviously never being ported to them.

2. They probably couldn't play Vorbis even if it was because Sandisk cut the RAM on them to just enough to decode MP3, WMA, and AAC, and one of the sticking points with Vorbis was that it requires a lot more RAM to unpack the vector codebook that resides at the beginning of each file.

As to point #2, you could be forgiven for saying "If Vorbis only needs 320 KB of RAM to decode, how much money could Sandisk have saved by scooping the brains out of their current portable media players?".

Well, the dedicated portable media player is a dying market. Some people still want them obviously. Apple killed the iPod off even though there's a market demand for it because they can use the lack of one to upsell you into an expensive phone that you may not even need (and figured out you could get people to go along with DRM if you framed it as "streaming"). (Turns out that they hadn't given up on stealing their customers' freedom. They merely took a pause to formulate a new strategy.)

But, the market is, nonetheless, shrinking, and Sandisk probably figured they could put out a cut rate MP3 player and nobody would ever know the difference except maybe the 1 customer in 500 that cares about Vorbis.

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #47
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.
Opus 96 kb/s (Android) / Vorbis -q5 (PC) / WavPack -hhx6m (Archive)

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #48
and does that in a large part by increasing bitrates significantly for difficult samples.
A good encoder is an encoder that knows when it's necessary to increase bitrate, no?

Re: Does Ogg Vorbis offer any advantages over Ogg Opus?

Reply #49
True, but in my experience it increases the average bitrate for most files in my collection, and I doubt every single one of them is a "killer" sample.
Opus 96 kb/s (Android) / Vorbis -q5 (PC) / WavPack -hhx6m (Archive)