The objectives:
Ogg must be the dominant container.
Vorbis must increase in popularity.

My plan:
If we could get MP3's in ogg containers, the radicals could 'transcode' their mp3's without losing quality.
If we got MPC in ogg containers, then ogg has the fastest highest quality encoder out their.

MP3 issue:
-We get better tagging schemes (ID3v1 too little, ID3v2 too much bloat).
-Proponents of Ogg could 'transcode' their whole mp3 collection, without loosing quality.
-People will need something to read Ogg MP3 files, and that something could easily also read Vorbis.
(and Ogg mpc).
-This would give Vorbis a major advantage in it's quest to overtake mp3.
Since Joe Public thinks all quicktimes are the same, and all avi's are the same he will think all ogg's are the same.
That's not a good thing, Joe needs to be educated, but it gives us an advantage.

MPC issue:
Ogg will have equal or higher quality and speed than anything else (please ignore the AAC-MPC debate).
Imagine when when simple PC magazine tests show Oqq beats everything else in quality and speed.
Again its taking advantage of ignorance, but what else is new?
And if Ogg becomes standard, than maybe we will see hardware support for Ogg Vorbis, Speex, Flac and MPC.
(Ogg MP3 hardware support is a technical no brainer)


Let the transcoding begin!

That sounds incredibly stupid in my head.
The goal of Vorbis is to eliminate MP3 and it's patents.
It's also to deliver better quality.
If you wrap an MP3 file up in an ogg-container, you are not getting better compression or getting rid of patents.

Of course, that's just MHO.

That's the idea.

Question:
Why hasn't ogg replaced mp3 yet?

1)Because the market is flooded with mp3, it's the standard.
2) no hardware support, but hardware manufactors don't support ogg because it isn't widely used,
so it's still point 1.

MP3 is legacy, the reason you probably still have parallel ATA and a floppy disk, is because of legacy support.
The stuff is too popular to phase out quickly.

Alot of Ogg enthousiasts still have a old collection of MP3's because transcoding would mean quality loss.
And if the enthousiasts don't convert to Ogg, how will the laymen?

So as a temporary solution make Ogg MP3.
The enthousiasts will convert their old MP3's to Ogg MP3's (and as a side benefit get better tagging) and rip new songs to Ogg Vorbis.
So everything will be Ogg for these people. Ogg market share increases.

Then some people(including me) don't use Vorbis, because MPC\AAC and even APS MP3 is better.
Getting MPC and MP3 in Ogg would make me convert all my old MP3's to Ogg MP3's and encode all my new stuff to Ogg MPC.

This leads to increased marketshare, giving Ogg a better chance to become dominant.

I mean what should I do with all my old MP3's? I won't transcode and loose quality.
So why not just put it in an Ogg and forget the old .mp3 files.
My player will determine when I have a Ogg MP3 or Vorbis or MPC or FLAC file (or even a Speex file)

And what will the ignorant laymen do after we all tell him ogg is better and he sees that lots of people use ogg?
Convert all his old mp3s to Ogg mp3s.
(with a very simple program ofcourse)
Rip new songs to Ogg Vorbis or Ogg MPC (depending on how much he cares about quality).

Nobody would rip new songs to Ogg MP3.
I mean if you (as a layman) could choose between encoding to Ogg, not knowing what the diffrence is between Ogg MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and the encoder gives you an option Vorbis 128 or MP3 128 and the geeks, who fix your pc, tell you to choose Vorbis, I mean to you (as a layman) it's all Ogg, right?

Compare this to the situation now:
layman:I want to encode avril lavinge.
me: use Ogg vorbis, it's better.
laymen: like your mozilla and openOffice? no way dude everyone uses mp3.

The situation then:
laymen: I want to encode avril lavinge.
me: use the setting vorbis 128.
laymen: why not MP3 128?
me: vorbis is better
laymen: but I do still get an ogg file, like everyone else has, right?
me: yep

So MP3 will still die out as new music is encoded to vorbis.
All Ogg MP3 does is act as a stepping stone.

Alot of people who buy lindows pc's at walmart think they have windows,i mean it looks like windows, it has internet and email and can play music and stuff, it must be windows.

Take advantage of their ignorance for the good cause my friend, instead of letting their ignorance make the rip to 64 kbps WMA (it's CD quality!)

That's a very interesting idea... Of course in a perfect world we could just educate the public and they'd actually listen . The problem I see is that if *everything* is .ogg, how would we tell what we're downloading? This wont matter unless you're a pirate of course but most of the general public with mp3's are. The point I'm getting at is, if an average Joe hops on a file sharing network, sees two ogg files - one 1mb, one 2mb. He's gonna go for the 1mb one will will probably be some sort of "transcoded" xing 128kb file. He's gonna listen and think "this isn't any better than mp3" and go back to downloading MP3s which will still be everywhere.

In a nutshell, this wouldn't do Ogg (Vorbis) any favours. I say keep with the educating and see what happens.

True.
But now on KaZaA (or so i'm told ) you have files of 1 MB and 2 MB.
The diffrence is right there in the "bitrate" field.
Joe has by now figured out that those small mp3's that say 64 in the bitrate field sound terrible.
So he'll figure it out with Ogg too.
And if he can't see the diffrence, we can't help him, maybe a ear doctor can

Remember transcoding to Ogg Vorbis lowers the quality.
But putting an mp3 in a Ogg container would do nothing to the quality.
And quite frankly it would be nice if all my media files were in Ogg containers.
(The better tags and having one media extension and a media "standard" would be nice)
(or matroska, if it proves to be a good container format)

Now when you have the Ogg file, you still need a decoder.
My idea is that players automatically get you a decoder (ever open avi or quicktime files? windows mediaplayer and apple quicktime auto connect for the right codec).
So then Joe is happy

I mean Joe doesn't know that quicktime and avi files are just containers, he thinks they are like mp3 and so.
It would be nice if he did know what a container is, but better he uses all oggs than all wma/wmv, right?

And yes JensRex i think it's very disgusting too, but if microshit can use the public ignorance to make them use cd quality WMA files @ 64 K, then we can too use their ignorance to further our cause of freedom.
So does the cause justify the methods in this case? I think so.

And since my MP3 files are here to stay, I would rather have them in a ogg container, it has the only disadvantage of adding a few kilobytes to a 5 meg file, but it would be better IMHO.

Ehm, I wrote some more detailed stuff but decided to bring it down to a few simple words:

Why do you think, Joe Somebody would switch from MP3 to your Ogg MP?

While technical possible, the whole idea is just a sign of plain stupidity.

Personally I'd rather not see this happen. I think all formats should easily be recognised as what they actually are, otherwise all it does it confuse people. I for one HATE avi due to the fact that there could have been either of several different codecs used and I don't know which one it was. Have you ever tried to play a DivX file in WMP and have it actually get the codec? I think not.

I reckon we should all distribute mp3 files with someone saying "Uh, download the Ogg version, its more bitrate efficient", then loop it for 4 minutes.

That'd work.

Ruairi

Sounds like a better plan to me.

Joe Somebody will switch when all the more 'computer experts' switch.
(computer experts would be you, me and the other dudes that know how to solve most computer problems.
the guys that Joe somebody calls when his pc malfunctions or wants to know how he can make mp3's)

The experts don't switch, mostly because:
1) transcoding their mp3's is stupid.(quality loss)
2)Because Vorbis ain't there with MPC\AAC\--alt-preset mp3's when it comes to quality.

(and because:
-of lacking hardware support,
-It's use is not widespread
but once the masses use vorbis, these issues get cleared up, and the masses will use it when the experts use it)

Ogg mp3 solves (1)
Ogg mpc solves (2)

Why will the experts should switch:

pros:
Better (standard) tagging that surely beats ID3.
One replaygain implementationfor all ogg files.
promote Ogg. (and thus vorbis)

cons:
You have to add some kb's to your multiple MB mp3's
You have to wait a hour while a small program puts all the mp3's in your ogg container

It breaks the step mp3-> Ogg vorbis, into:
mp3 ->Ogg mp3 -> Ogg vorbis.

Ogg is a good container, why would anyone not want to put their mp3's in a good container?
One container is a good thing.
Why do we put FLAC, Speex and vorbis files in Ogg containers?
It's just a good container.



Get ffdshow.It'sgot all the codecs in a nifty package.

Second with ogg, we won't have MS endorsing some formats and not others.
With decentralized servers you could be sure that all codec's are available.
And some dude will release something like ffdshow,so that you have all codecs installed all of the time.

And you can always see what codec is actually used in an avi file (usually just by clicking on properties), so it's not like you don't know what codecs are used.


But since everyone thinks i'm a crackpot

Anyway I only found out about matroska after originally starting this thread.
Who knows if matroska is succesful and becomes the standard container we will all use that.

The ogg container has no tag support at all. Vorbiscomments are implemented in flac, speex and vorbis codecs.

If you want better tag support in mp3 files, use APE2 tags.

I can implement APE2 in mp3?
I didn't know that, guess I need to do some digging in the forums...

And I thought Ogg supported tags on its own...

Maybe I should learn a little more about Ogg containers before I advocate them.

I'll dig the forums now

And another quote that shows you should know at least something about technologies before advocating them.

It's not a Codec Package (like the one of Nimo, which will most likely blow up at least something), but an all-in-one DirectShow filter, which uses routines of ffmpeg and XviD.

dev0

Technically you can use ape2 tags with mp3 just as well as you can use id3-tags.
Problem is that only (AFAIK) foobar2000 supports reading these tags from mp3 files.

It's true, I know nothing about ffdshow.
All i know is, I install it and all my avi files play, no matter what codec.
It has a whole list of supported codecs, and the guy that gave it to me said it's a package of codecs.
I also got that nimo thing.
For me the video codec scene is simply too much to get involved.
And since hollywood produces crap (IMHO) the only video i watch are some streaming videos (sadly wmv or real) and I got some music videos (usually mpeg)

But may the record show I wasn't actively advocating ffdshow, just recommending to a guy who hates all these diffrent codecs in avi files a simple way to get them to play.

Anyway look at what I stumbled across:



Heh if all mp3 and mpc users put their files in Ogg containers it would boost Ogg, and according to Monty the end-users don't need to know which codec as long as it's an ogg file.
So my idea certainly helps the cause.

All I want is Ogg to have three characteristics:
1) transparent audio at optimum bitrates(Which MPC would provide)
2) Acceptable quality at 128 K (Which Vorbis provides)
3) Backwards compatibility with MP3 (which ofcourse mp3 would provide)

Dude. Wrapping an MP3 file up in an Ogg container does not create backwards compatibility, it creates incompatibility. MP3 players are most likely not going to recognize the MP3-stream inside the Ogg file.

Your idea is as good as that guy who suggested Xiph should rename Ogg Vorbis to the cutting edge "FreeMP3".

It does create backward compatibility.
All you need is a simple codec.
Putting a file in a ogg container and getting it out is easy.
And we already have mp3/mpc codecs, so putting an ogg around them and extracting them is very easy.

Backwards compatibility is:
Stepping over to a new format.
Being able toplay the old format.

So we step over to Ogg (which includes all the codecs: vorbis, flac, speex and if I have my way mpc and mp3).
We do these two things to step over:
Run a program that puts all our mp3's\mpc's in ogg containers.
Configure EAC\cdex to rip new songs to Ogg (be that vorbis, flac or mpc (not mp3, it's inferior))

Now since our Ogg players play all the Ogg's (vorbis,flac...) we just play all our old and our new files.

We stepped over, and we can still play our old files.
voila! backwards compatibility.

And when a new codec comes along that people would want to use, put it in Ogg!

And we can live in a world where our mediaplayer is called OggAmp and plays all Ogg files.
(Including the Ogg mp3 files we ripped in the '90s)
And our great grand children will think: Ogg = digital music.

The other option is living in a world where we have a MediaPlayer that can play:
Ogg files,
MP3 files,
MPC files,
New codecs.

You see the idea behind Ogg is (like the letter from monty that I quoted) everyone plays Ogg, and nothing else.
And the codecs are banned to HA.org where they can be discussed and ABX'd to death so that we can tell end-users which 'settings'(codec) they should use when creating music (read Ogg) files.

Ogg will be King har har har. (w00t) (w00t) (w00t)

Edit:

My idea may suck (and it probably does, I just want to have the Ogg container be King in a zealous way).
But it is nothing like renaming Ogg to FreeMP3.
Renaming mp+ to musepack, living audio is more comparable

I disagree with salt28 about placing mp3 in ogg containers. As stated before, this in itself would not make ogg "backwards compatible" with mp3. It also creates patent issues, which defeats the main goal of ogg to begin with... "completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source".

However, I do think salt28 brings up some valid ideas. As far as I can tell, hardware support for ogg is lacking, if not invisible. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before this is no longer the case. Either hardware manufacturers will directly support ogg with updated firmware, or general purpose handheld devices will become compact enough that they will alleviate the need for specific "digital audio players". Until that time comes, wouldn't it be in the interest of the lesser-known open-source formats to join forces with ogg, which has the greatest chance of becoming popular? Don't get me wrong, I know that mpc currently may have some patent issues itself, and even if it didn't, I'm not really sure how feasible it is to wrap mpc into an ogg container. But I hardly think you can just pass off salt28's idea as "stupidity". Feasibility aside, I DO wish that the best of the open source formats could join forces SOMEHOW, so that when a manufacturer does decide to implement a new decoder into their hardware, playback of other formats becomes a reality too. Like I said though, "feasibility aside".

Anyone wishing is welcome to delete this post

Yes that doesn't seem to be a good idea to me either. But if you advocate for switching to Matroska as the default container for Vorbis as well as other codecs then I think that could eventually be better.

I am sure this will encourage hardware support.

So in order to implement FLAC hardware support, you need to support:

Normal FLAC
OggFLAC
MatroskaFLAC
FLAC in MP4
FLAC in AVI
FLAC in whatever

Like that is going to happen.

I agree. I think projects like MPC / Vorbis / Flac / Wavpack / Monkey's Audio could encourage the use of Matroska by making it their default container format (Wouldn't SV8 be doing that as planned?). MP4 / MP3 / Mp3Pro are industry driven and they usually don't care for the best technology/consumer friendliness but DRM and other corporate control benefits, so I wouldn't expect them to do such a switch unless Matroska becomes very popular.

And we at least know Matroska has distinct advantages as a container format over the others. It wouldn't be for the sake of domination only then but for the best use of technology.

salt28: think of the Ogg container more like a zip file. You can place stuff inside and get it back out + extras. Now if your player supports reading from zip files, that just means it can get the data you stuffed in the container back out. That doesn't mean the player has any idea what to do with the data it just extracted. It may recognize it as Vorbis audio and load the Vorbis decoder. Because the author of the player software didn't implement mpc support, you can't play the mpc even if you correctly extracted the mpc audio data from the container. Where is the increase in compatibility

If you download (legally of course) an Ogg file today, you can be pretty sure that it uses Vorbis audio. You also know that your player can play this format (Vorbis audio). If what you propose happens, you won't know what your getting beforehand! Confusing!

I can't follow your argumentation how pros would influence Jow Average. If the pros tell him to use Ogg Vorbis, he won't listen, but if the pros tell him to use the Ogg container for his mp3s, he will?

Other issues:
Philosophy: Ogg will no longer be fully patent free
How does fooling the dumb user encourage freedom?
How can you promote Ogg's quality, if there could be 128 Xing mp3s inside?
The need to implement dozens of codecs will make hardware support much harder.

Well iTunes when putting mp3's on the iPod strips off the tags and puts that in a special DB file.
Then the raw file is written to the disk.

Why couldn't the same be done with all of the above?
Have the pc rip off the container before putting it on the device.

I know my suggestion makes no technical sense.
But remember, consumers don't make technical sense either.
If you read the title, it implies using consumer ignorance to further the Ogg format.
Technically it shouldn't be real hard.
Technically it doesn't need to be real smart.

Hardware support doesn't come because it's easy or logical or free to implement.
It comes when consumers want it.
And consumers will want devices that play Ogg when everything around them is Ogg.
And unless we rename those .mp3's to .ogg, all they will see around them is .mp3.
Let creative, apple, iRiver and Archos worry how they will provide this ability to play all Ogg files to consumers.




Ogg will be patent free, just like 7zip is a free zip format. The media in it won't have to be patent free.

Fooling users doesn't encourage their freedom. manipulating them is what i'm actually proposing.
But it's manipulating them to make them use free software.
I give my friends mozilla, openOffice, 7zip, exodus IM , Red hat Linux, Debian and other software.
Not because mozilla is better for them than IE, but because I need "commoners" to support free software so that I'm not the only one stuck with it.
And I happily support them when they use my software.
Not everyone is going to embrace Free software, it's up to those who do to motivate the others.

And about Ogg's quality:
You say:"Making mp3's from your Ogg's doesn't improve their music quality (much )
Ripping cds with your Ogg encoder set to "vorbis qX" will improve the quality and set to "mpc qX" will give even better quality"
Very easy and straightforward to understand.

Quite frankly this is all about aggresive marketing, not technical utopia.
I see AAC becoming tomorrow's standard,and I don't like it.
I'd much rather have vorbis and mpc be tomorrows standard, but if we aren't willing to aggresivly promote it,
then the laymen will follow the MS sales rep's who will without a blink claim 64 K WMA is cd quality.

Anyway matroska is more promising than Ogg as the standard container.
But since nobody likes my idea of having all media files in a standard container,i'll let this thread die.

lol

one of your points why people are not using ogg is, that there is no hardware support. when you wrap mp3 into oggs there will be no hardware support either

second thing: if people don't move to a format that is better than mp3 why move to a "format" (mp3 in oggs) which has absolutely no advantage for them. you just lose hardware and player support. and no, tagging not an advantage, you can use ape2 tags you dont need the ogg container for it.

third thing: how do people know its mp3 and not vorbis. why should people download .oggs which contains mp3 data? then you can also download .oggs containing vorbis data. and why would people prefer oggs with mp3 data to vorbis ? people don't even know about vorbis. why should they know then about a thing that is complete nonsense: mp3 data in ogg containers. you can be glad if people know that MP3 is not =MP3 (xing, lame, blade etc)

nonsense

Salt28, the real point is that you don't achieve any compatibility at all.
Even if stripping the ogg container was supported the player would have to support every format you wrap inside the ogg container.
There's really no point in having it wrapped inside a container. Only more problems.

Let me get this straight : You want everyone to use Ogg, and "Ogg will be King har har har." no matter it involves any technical superiority or not. That's really pointless. Just because you like Ogg is not enough a reason to popularize it. You don't seem to be making any clear argument either in favor of its advantages. That's what I usually observe of most Ogg users, they have this unexplicable zeal. They love Ogg for an unknown reason. Manipulating the masses for loving Ogg ? That seems utterly ridiculous to me. Did you think consciously about why you like Ogg this much? (Don't tell me open source because there're other alternatives) Why are you trying to impose your blind love to everyone else?

Why would't AAC become tomorrow's standard ? I think now that the industry has some format to agree upon AAC has some future. Seeking domination is absurd. It's thanks to variety we have all the good things like BSDs, MPC, etc. And none of these are going to become popular but that doesn't make them any less worthy.

What do you mean?What happened to your post, that was the funniest thing i've read all week, litterally had me laughing aloud, bript and too the point!!!

Kristian

I liked it too. I guess rjamorim is having some kind of a problem with the admins

Replying to OGG MP? for the fundamentalist free.
fundamentalist as in radical and non-compromising.

I don't want to impose it on anyone, I want to aggresively market it.
For selfish purposes I admit.
Sure AAC is comparable to MPC, and MP3 is also comparable to Vorbis.
Maybe I read slashdot to much or something, but still man...

And I guess the (albeit censored) profanity in rjamorim post was the reason he deleted it.
Why people find the need to cuss, I don't understand, personally I'd rather say something stupid like:

than cuss, but YMMV.

All I can do is wait till someone hacks the iPod properly or the oqo comes out so that I can have a portable that will run my vorbis and mpc files

And just so you know I intended this to be a discussion about how we can promote Ogg.

It just needs to be technically feasible (which I think it is), not technically superior.

What do you mean by "fundamentalist free" ? Do you intend to mean non-conformist? Because as far as I can see you are very fundamentalist when it comes to vorbis.

And all other projects are as technically feasible, at least try to promote something that is also technically superior. Apart from that Ogg is just another format. There's no need to be attached to that as long as it does not perform as amazing as MPC

If it makes anyone feel any better I am just an 18 year old cs college student, who has a week free.
(Passed all my classes so I get a week vacation)
I suck at philosophy, but do it even so.

I hardly took myself serious, just read the title and beginning of this thread:



the most serious part of my post was when I realized that:
Ogg doesn't have tags in the container(I guess that needs to be fixed )
APE2 works with mp3.

As a matter of fact I am listening to a korean song at the moment, and don't understand any korean.
Nor am I korean, or do I personally know any koreans, but iRiver is cool and, save the US and South-Africa, South Korea is the coolest country in the world. B)

So I'm sorry for polluting your otherwise very information-rich boards with my ramblings.
I'll continue lurking, like I always do.

Salt28, the reason why rjamorims post was remove was because of a heated discussion I had with him about the need to flame ppl even when their statements are wrong, useless or just foolish.
You should however have read rjamorim's post. He explained very well why your idea can't bring any good nor help the goal of Ogg Vorbis in any way.

Right now I'm equally upset that you ignore all argumentation against your proposal and does not, as far as I'm able to understand you posts, explain what there possibly is to gain from your proposal.

edit: I'm sorry I ever contacted my best friend on the net, rjamorim, about his post. Maybe he was just faster than me to realize that you are indeed not listening to common sense. If that sounds harsh I'm sorry. But I can't draw any other conclusion from your posts in this thread; though judging from other posts you have made to other threads this does not seem to be ageneral character flaw.

Actually my idea is very simple.
To promote ogg by renaming mp3's to ogg's (by putting them in ogg containers).
Everyone pointed out that it would have no advantages as far as features and quality are concerned,
I did get that.
They pointed out that it would on the short term hurt the cause.
I did get that.
They pointed out that it isn't as integer as some would like.
I got that too.
they pointed out that it goes against 'the flow',ie the way things commonly work.
Yes, surprise I got that too.
I knew that before I started this all.

But my point is simple:
If a large enough amount of people would dump their .mp3's and make them .ogg's (by putting them in ogg containers).
Then that would make ogg more popular.(and by association vorbis).
And once ogg would have that critical mass, software/hardware developpers would have to support it to
please customers.
Sure this would cost us some technical superiority,but I found nthat acceptable.
But it seemed noone would consider this simple point because the costs and chance of failure are to great.

Yes it's a half-baked idea.
I got that.
Half-baked idea's suck.
And it probably was irresponsible to post a half-baked idea on a serious forum.
I thought the half-bakedness would be obvious by the way I wrote.
(You know the topic title and description, the way it started with "objectives:")
Apperantly not.
I'm sorry for not posting this in the off-topic section.
And I'm sorry for not being more explicit about the half-bakedness of my thread.
And I'm sorry I gave the impression I was dead serious about this.
And I'm sorry I made this into a heated discussion.

As I understand it, his idea of putting MP3 into a Ogg container is more of a psychological campaign in order to get the common user to feel comfortable with files having a .ogg extension. When people are more familiar with certain filetypes they don't avoid them, as is the case for .ogg files at the moment.

Although this sounds nice in theory, the official Ogg container is only supposed to be used with Vorbis, Tarkin, Theora, Flac, and Speex. A while back support for MPEG-4 streams was added to the Ogg container. The Ogg team members went ape-shit seeing as MPEG-4 was a proprietary technology. The new container was forced to be renamed to OGM for Ogg Media (for other secondary reasons as well). And more sparks flew.

Secondly, if MP3 were allowed in the Ogg spec, it could easily crowd out Vorbis, and instead of having people accept it through psychological conditioning it would be replaced by MP3 in Ogg. MP3 in Ogg, if accepted, could render Vorbis useless to the normal user. That is definately not what we want. The average user isn't as quality conscientous as audiophiles (and videophiles) and would rather continue using what is familiar to them. If the vast libraries of MP3s were muxed into Ogg, Vorbis would become a second class citizen in it's own territory.

Finally, the Ogg container is very limited and if a audio container should become predominant, I would prefer the open-source Matroska Audio ( http://matroska.org ). MKA files have greater flexibility, in theory, anything can be muxed into an MKA, be it Vorbis, MP3, Musepack, FLAC, etc. I do feel that Matroska is the container of the future, and the Ogg team's thick-headed approach of completely ignoring proprietary formats in their Ogg spec will lead to the Ogg container's failure. OGM is, by far, the second most predominant container around now (next to AVI). Matroska is poised to unseat OGM, and Ogg is no where to be found.

Just my 2 cents.

Yes it's completly psychological.(I should have used that word).
I mean no one hesitates to try to open a avi file, they're comfortable with that.

Anyway.
I started this thread minutes before I discovered matroska.
(It's on the frontpage of HA.org today,and I only looked into it after my post)
And yes matroska definently has more potential to become the standard container.

I was unaware that the Ogg developers went ape-shit when people put Mpeg-4 in ogg containers.
I thought the whole OGM was because it's a more "serious" name, instead of the lovable Ogg name.
And because it wasn't created by the xiph team.

I thought Ogg was supposed to be a universal container, seeing how they started out with vorbis and theora and later added tarkin, flac and speex. So I thought that basically anything could be added.
And since matroska is still in it's infancy, I held on to Ogg(and OGM).
I really got the impression that the xiph team wanted Ogg to be a standard container (supporting so many codec's as it does, and it is often stressed that Ogg is a general media container format).

True most users aren't as quality cautious when it comes to encoding, but if developpers would simply not support direct mp3 encoding to Ogg (but only converting mp3 files to ogg) and would recommend vorbis -qX, then users would encode fresh rips to vorbis.

But if xiph doesn't want the Ogg container to be a standard container for all media files,
and won't support that cause, I guess I'll wait for matroska.
And when it's mature I'll put all my mp3's and mpc's and even ogg flac's in it.

IMHO, this is one of the most interesting, well thought-out replies I have read so far. It hits the heart of what salt28 is arguing , unlike some of the earlier posts.
Edit: Animaniac, glad to have you with us. Note that this is Animaniac's first post

I don't see the idea of pushing MP3 inside Ogg... However, I see a real reason to push Vorbis instead of AAC and MP3. The reason is that both AAC and MP3 are proprietary standards. They are patented and you can't use them legally unless you (or the company selling you a product) pay licensing fees to the patent holders. This means that if you use LAME in the US, you're likely breaking the law. Lately, even software MP3 decoders need to have royalties paid. What this means is that if you use a proprietary standard, you are at the mercy of whoever controls it. When you use Vorbis, nobody can tell you what to do. I think that's much more important than a +- 10% bit-rate difference for equal quality.

If I could search for .ogg specificly in kazaa that would be a good start!

just search for "ogg". I did this some time ago and found very few.

It's not that almost all people, that do filesharing, care about that one.