>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.

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.

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.)



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.

>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.

"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).

An interesting new initiative: Play Ogg.

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 consumes a lot of BBsig chara's.

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

It's a worthy effort, just a shame that they capitalised the G's.

On the 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/ is better for someone new to Ogg Vorbis than http://playogg.org/... ...and there's a donate button for Xiph.org at the Vorbis.com site, too.

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/

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) :-|

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?

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.

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.

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?

I think that they choose VLC for various reasons... and all are perfectly valid for me...

1) It's free software... <-- Is promoted by the FSF...
2) It's GPL. <-- Again a plus for the FSF.
3) It's cross-platform. <--Very important, its where many players fail.
4) It support Ogg/Vorbis/Theora out-of-box. <-- 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 (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.

MPC (Media Player Classic) can play Ogg Vorbis out-of-box in the latest version (probably a few months ago)...

Okay, you have a point there, jorsol.

I still remember this one too...

In my opinion vorbis.com needs a good CMS !!!

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.

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.

http://oggvorbis.fc2web.com/link.html

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

88x31


200x40


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

Ogg community it says. Although I know little Japanese, Chinese character it is.

It says Ogg Village and it's the logo of www3.to/oggv, which is supposed to link that site.

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...

*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.

Eh? It doesn't scroll horizontally on me (FX 2.0.0.3, 1024x68).

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.

... and the "Play Ogg" campaign is now made mainstream by LifeHacker:

http://lifehacker.com/software/digital-mus...rbis-262021.php

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.

could of swore I had a post in here

See this:

Wired has picked up on the Play Ogg initiative.

Also:

Wired's analysis on the effect of recently-litigated MP3 patents.

Edit: The first article above does a good job trying to explain Ogg Vorbis and help people play it.

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).

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.

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.

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.

You can point them to AudioGrabber.

My grief, too.

For the rest of the world that's not members of HA, I don't think HA's TOS applies

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...)

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

It is at this point that you lower the bitrate to 80 kbps without telling them and get their assessment of the SQ.

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

Why Audio Format Matters

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.

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/#audio0

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

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

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

Cortado applets:
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.

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.

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.

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/

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.