Real Will Include Ogg Vorbis Support

Skuto writes "Following the example of AOL with Winamp, RealNetworks has decided to give Ogg Vorbis their sign of approval and will be including support into their player software. The press release has more information. Meanwhile, independent listening tests are being set up to determine how well Vorbis fares against its competitors WMA, AAC and MP3Pro. You can help by signing up for the tests here." A couple of comments (1, 2) in our previous story provide the best description of what Real is doing, if you missed them.

Anybody

[scott1853]

Does anybody still have Real Player installed? And actually use it for a general player and not just for when certain cites require it for video clips?

Open Source wins again

[tps12]

Victory! First Real puts out a Linux version, then we learn that Real is going Open Source (and not just with their own stuff, but with Microsoft's as well), and now they embrace Ogg, the best codec ever!

It's good to see companies finally "get" Free Software. I am now going to Real's website to download the latest RealPlayer public alpha for $25, just to show my support for their recent behavior. I encourage every person in the world to do the same.

Linux rules!

A geek format... damn cool, but a geek format...

[RinkSpringer]

When Ogg Vorbis 1.0 was released, I converted all my audio CD's to Ogg files. It looks as if the Ogg encoder is much faster than LAME with variable bitrate, but I haven't really compared them accurately.

I fear the issue with Ogg Vorbis is that it is not as known as MP3. OK, so Unreal2 uses Ogg Vorbis... but do you honestly believe most gamers really read the manual, and especially the credits? I wouldn't think so.

At my work, I told a few employees about Ogg Vorbis, and absolutely no one ever heard about it. Some even said: "Why would I want to use that? I have MP3 and it works fine!". They simply don't care about patents and such, they just want it to work...

Based upon this, I fear Ogg Vorbis will only be used by geeks. Maybe when major software like Nero can instantly create Ogg files and not just MP3 files when saving tracks, it will be more known by the masses.

Re:Day late. Dollar short.

[leshert]

A few years ago, you could have said the same thing about PNG. Now, every major image editor supports it, as do all the major image viewers and web browsers.

The existence of a defacto standard doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to improve on that standard.

Re:Anybody

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, yeah, I do.

There's no native player for Windows Media for Linux, and there's so many radio stations out there using Real. I'd prefer they streamed MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, so what choice do I have?

None of the win32 emulating players like aviplay or mplayer are particularly stable yet.

When is someone going to reverse engineer Windows Media? I've tried, but I just don't understand audio encoding enough.

Re:Anybody

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

It's possible to castrate the nasty parts of Real Player so that it stops taking over all your file associations and popping up "messages". I remember doing it manually, the main thing is deleting this .exe which RealPlayer runs on startup both of your computer and whenever you use RealPlayer, along with removing anything else it runs on your computer's startup and changing some of the RealPlayer settings. Now I can play Real content but otherwise I never notice I have Real on my computer.

Ad-Aware would probably do it for you with more ease.

Tim

Re:Ahh, but you forgot one thing....

[RadioheadKid]

Based upon this, I fear Ogg Vorbis will only be used by geeks.

Many people are listeners not rippers. Geeks are the most efficient rippers and propagators of music. Many people don't care what format to which they are listening, as long as it plays in their favorite player. I send files to my friends in Ogg Vorbis format. The first time I sent them, I attached the Winamp plugin. Now, you don't even have to do that, it's included. One of my friends said that he hates when he finishes listening to one of the songs I sent to him and then the next song is an mp3, he realizes how bad a lot of his mp3's sound.

Now not having a portable Ogg Vorbis player is a whole different story...

Re:Hardware Acceptance

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Ogg Vorbis on DVD players will be a bit more work for the manufacturers. Don't forget that MP3 is really MPEG Audio Layer 3. By supporting MPEG systems they get automatic MP3 decoder support. If they want to add Ogg Vorbis support that means they'll have to include a totally seperate set of routines in their decoding software.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the support. But we'll probally see it adopted much quicker in dedicated MP3 players first, cause they don't have full MPEG support so they aren't getting something for nothing, they just have custom audio decoding software.

Re:Day late. Dollar short.

[David Gerard]

"mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping."

Actually, it's the defacto standard for file sharing. For ripping your own CDs, you'd be a fool to stick to mp3 - you can get much better sound in less disk space with Ogg. One place Ogg really needs support is in CD ripping applications, like AudioCatalyst.

See what you can do with your filesharing app to get it to share and search .ogg files - and if it doesn't, lobby the programmers.

Re:Anybody

[jandrese]

I just hate how RealOne tries to keep sending data back to Real. I have zone alarm preventing it's connections but it tries to connect every 30 minutes or so. Personally I don't trust Real to not sell my data, so I'm rather hesitant to allow any data back to their servers.

It's not like there's an option to turn off the reporting either. It also doesn't help that the player has falled for the "skin" diesease. As soon as any program picks up the ability to skin itself it ships with the most god-awful interface possible (witness WMP7), often with a loss of functionality (witness WMP7).

Finally, here's a hint for you media player writers: do not open webpages automatically (especially "UPGRADE NOW OR THE BUNNY GETS IT" pages) at startup. If I wanted to go to a webpage I would have started my web browser.

Re:Anybody

[zerocool^]

I wish I could find the winamp plug in that my friend used to have. It was really simple - install real player so you have the codec, then bust up into the permissions and tell real it was NEVER EVER ALLOWED TO RUN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, EVER. Then you added this plugin to winamp, and it played real files (videos, if you can dig it) in the little side window of winamp that no one uses (the minibrowser?). I've seen it work, but I think real got onto winamp and got them to remove the plugin. I don't know why, both are owned by AOL nowadays. Regardless, I haven't seen it.

Anyway, if you follow the "underground", and by underground, I mean the message boards on sites similar to doom9.org - divx.com, etc, ogg is about to explode. Support is included in winamp 2.80. I would say once the college year starts up, they're going to get extremely popular. Once the CD Burning programs support oggs the same way they do mp3s, it's going to take off. For now, I guess we use waveout in winamp to slam them into wave files. Soon (i.e. once a large number of the "underground" people have ogg codecs installed), Gordion Knot will support DVD rips with ogg files. It's right up their alley - variable bitrate and all that.

~Will

Uh, this is a good thing?

[interstellar_donkey]

I'm not going to rehash the several posts from before that explain in detail why Real sucks. It does. That's a fact.

To think that it's a victory for OGG that another 'mainstreme' app supports it is assinine.

All this means is, if you have to install Real for certian media, it will take over the file extension and it will take that much longer to load and that much more tracking of your online habits.

We need to stop cheering whenever some big, sloppy crappy application takes a shine to an otherwise good format, and start enjoying the format as it stands.