Do Not Use the Vorbis FFMPEG enecoder if you building WebM!, Monty mentions this in his blog post, but nobody is listening! Options

[HotshotGG]

A lot of open-source enthusiasts and advocates are very excited about Google latest announcement of VP8 / Vorbis combo in a new container called WebM. The entire HTML 5 enthusiasts are so excited that they went a ahead a little to prematurely are building suboptimal builds! Michael Niedermeyer of FFMPEG projects acknowledges that the FFMPEG Vorbis encoder is buggy! Monty has a work around on his blog if you plan on building the WebM encoder under Linux. I am also providing an explanation in the wiki as to why it's generally a good idea to use the mainline libvorbis with libavcodec instead due to the fact that is has 5.1 channel coupling implemented correctly! Please spread the word as this will turn into a disaster sooner or later before it's patched. If you thought the HTML 5 wars are not bad enough now!

Monty's Blog:
http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/51160.html

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Jun 12 2010, 18:43

[NullC]

TOS #8!!!

[Zarggg]

TOS #8!!!

How is it TOS8 if the user is just passing on word that ffmpeg is acknowledging a known bug in their encoder? Do we need to ABX for programming errors now?

Sarcasm aside, Kohlrabi does make a good point.

[NullC]

TOS #8!!!

How is it TOS8 if the user is just passing on word that ffmpeg is acknowledging a known bug in their encoder? Do we need to ABX for programming errors now?
Sarcasm aside, Kohlrabi does make a good point.

It's not buggy in that sense. It's not like it crashes. The claim is that it produces significantly poor quality. Squarely within the sights of TOS8.

There are some people who do not believe these claims, or at least think they are exaggerated. The largest and most visible user of WEBM is using ffvorbis.
It would be useful to have an independent (from the developers of libvorbis) validation of the perceptual performance... since the "well known suggestion to use libvorbis" is not that well known.

[Zarggg]

It's not buggy in that sense. It's not like it crashes.

As a programmer, my definition of "bug" is any incorrect coding that causes the program to act in a way that was not intended by the developers. It doesn't always have to crash.

[NullC]

It's not buggy in that sense. It's not like it crashes.

As a programmer, my definition of "bug" is any incorrect coding that causes the program to act in a way that was not intended by the developers. It doesn't always have to crash.

Did you also sleep at a holiday inn express?

It's not _buggy_ it doesn't perform in unexpected ways, my crashing comment was an example— it wasn't intended to imply that I thought that all bugs cause crashes (and I clearly don't). The ffvorbis encoder is just lacking the kind of serious psychoacoustic analysis and tuning that libvorbis has, it probably has bugs too ... most non-trivial software does, but that probably isn't the reason that it performs the way it does.

IMHO the only problem is that the name of the encoder is vorbis in FFmpeg and the official vorbis encoder is called libvorbis. People who don't know there are more than one vorbis encoder will stick to the low quality one.

Well— that and libvorbis isn't compiled by default in ffmpeg and requires an extra dependency. So there are many people that have ffmpeg binaries where acodec vorbis was the only way to get vorbis output. Even if it had been called crappy-vorbis it still would be used by people who didn't know or didn't care to get a better binary.

FWIW, The ffmpeg folks agreed to temporarily disable acodec vorbis' encoder in the 0.6.0 release. Though, at least historically, almost everyone runs some build or another from ffmpeg svn... so it's not a closed issue yet.

A web-accessible citation that the developers of ffvorbis consider it to be unusably bad would be very helpful.

The ffmpeg people have said many times not to use their vorbis encoder. This is why they have support for the Xiph one. The problem has nothing to do with people refusing to believe ffmpeg and Xiph about how to encode vorbis files, as such providing more evidence will not help at all.

Many times... but you can't find a citation for me? I'm not insisting because I don't believe you, I'm insisting because I can't find one and it would be very useful to have one.

People have very much refused to believe us at Xiph that this is actually a serious issue. I wouldn't be asking for people to do testing here if we weren't currently having some problems convincing some big and important organizations that they really shouldn't use the ffvorbis encoder.

Canar reporting in with an ABX. A blind monkey could do it. I see deaf people.

Thank you. As funny as it is, this simply test _will_ help convince people that there is something they need to worry about.