Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support

An anonymous reader writes "While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."

Storage vs processing vs quality

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There will always be some sort of trade off between cost effectiveness of storage vs processing and cost effectiveness. There are no obvious winners, and the best solution will change as the memory vs micro prices change.

Many voice mail systems only use 32kbps sampling and achieve fine results for that purpose, and the algorithms are easy enough to render on a 8-bit micro costing 50c.

When it comes to medium quality sound then there are basically two routes you can take: 8 bit micro (or even some dumb logic)running less fancy algorithms and a bit more flash/rom to store more verbose sound data; or more compressed sound and a flashier micro to run a heavier algorithm. You can now get 32-bit ARM micros for less than $1 making the second option reasonably feasible at low cost.

However flash is very cheap. NAND flash only costs approx 2c per MB (for multi-MB chips, so small chips are going to cost more per MB). You can fit a lot of "mama" phrases in a couple of MB. As a result you don't want to spend too much money on micros to save on flash.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Another advantage with ogg over mp3 is that it supports more than 2 channels. The video game industry, especially those doing dev on next-gen consoles, are quite aware of this.

Read the specs, it is more than for toys

[markdavis]

The "article" (actually the spec page) shows the device is much more that just a chip for toys. Otherwise, they would not have tone controls, stereo output, customizable firmware, "spacial processing", and most especially a FULL SPEED USB interface!

The unit looks like something that is much more useful as something like an iPod shuffle (since there is no display controller). And in reasonable quantity- the sucker only costs $4! Add a several more dollars of flash, battery, case, connectors, and buttons, and "ta da", you have a reasonable, cheap, portable audio stereo device.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[Dutch Gun]

Consoles have hardware-accelerated ADPCM compression for normal sfx, but audio streams can certainly be compressed with Vorbis. All the commercial audio libraries support it at this point, or else it's easy enough to add the support yourself. The next-gen engines have plenty of horsepower to spare for vorbis decoders - it's really not that expensive as long as you don't go too crazy with simultaneous decodes.

Our company is switching from mp3 to vorbis for our upcoming projects - it's definitely a better format for a closed system such as games. As is oft-mentioned here, it's a better-sounding codec at lower bitrates, which is important for MMOs, since occasional updates are expected - and saving bandwidth wherever possible certainly matters. And, it has a few technical benefits such as sample-accurate decoding (MP3 decodes in blocks, so you have to write additional kludges to get around this), which is helpful for loops.

It's nice to hear the format is picking up a bit of steam. I've had my eye on it for a long time, and have been impressed with the steady progress that has been made.

Re:MP3 License

[mrchaotica]

MP3 for things you want at a higher quality, Ogg for things less important.

You've got that backwards. Vorbis is a better codec (in terms of sound quality at a given level of compression) than MP3.

Branding: "Ogg" vs. "Vorbis"

[mrchaotica]

Well, the problem is that you don't understand what "Ogg" and "Vorbis" (and "Theora") actually are. There's actually two different things here: codecs and container formats. "Ogg" refers to the container format; it's comparable to Quicktime, AVI, or Matroska. "Vorbis" and "Theora" refer to codecs (audio and video respectively); Vorbis is comparable to MPEG 1 layer 3 (aka MP3) or Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) and Theora is comparable to MPEG 2, DivX or H.264.

So, when people say "Ogg Vorbis" what they're actually referring to is a Vorbis audio stream inside an Ogg container. Presumably, it's possible to have a file with a raw Vorbis bitstream (without the Ogg container), and it's certainly possible to have an Ogg container without a Vorbis bitstream. This is also why Ogg Theora files have an .ogg extension; they're actually files with a Theora video stream and (probably) Vorbis audio stream, inside an Ogg container.

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[CryoPenguin]

There's no problem with decoding MP3 in a fixed buffer size. Each frame contains exactly 1152 audio samples.

The MP3 problem you might be thinking of is the bit reservoir: Constant bitrate MP3 only pretends to be constant bitrate. If you look at the spacing between MP3 frame headers it looks like each frame is exactly the same size. But they're really not: frames can borrow bits from nearby frames, so the compressed data at one place in the stream doesn't necessarily decode to the decompressed samples that nominally correspond with that frame. Thus it's tricky to determine where you have to start decoding if you want to seek to a given sample number, and the naive seeking method could be off by about +/- 0.25 seconds.

That problem is specific to MP3; I don't know of any other audio format that suffers from it. All Vorbis had to do to fix it was be logical and put each bit in the frame it's supposed to be in, not in some random other frame.

Re:Informal poll

[mrchaotica]

Hence, we should call them "ogg" files.

...when we're talking about the file format, that is. In this case, however, we're talking about chips designed specifically to decode the Vorbis audio stream, so "Vorbis" (without Ogg, unless the chip is capable of understanding the container format too) is the appropriate name to use in this thread.

Re:MP3 License

[Myopic]

That price list is for lots and lots of different chips and packages. Presumably, some of them (maybe many or most, I don't know the company, I just looked at the price list because of your comment) have MP3 capability. Also presumably, from what I know of Ogg Vorbis, the license cost would not apply to the Ogg-only chip(s).

Re:MP3 License

[Rufus211]

If you look at the price list for this chip it states that "Prices include MP3 license of Thomson Multimedia."

If you actually read the price list, you'll see that the VS1000 isn't included on there. All the other chips they produce are MP3 playback, so have to pay the MP3 license. Presumably when they update the price list to include the VS1000, they'll modify the wording.

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron modded that insightful?

Windows Media Player is a media player, ogg vorbis is an audio codec. You can play ogg files with WMP11 if you install the codec.

Re:MP3 License

[maeka]

Repeated double-blind listening tests performed at/by HydrogenAudio show that Vorbis and MP3 achieve [i]transparency[/i] at about the same bitrate.
Vorbis and AAC are both superior formats when compared to MP3 on their technical merits. LAME, however, is the leveler.

Never underestimate the impact of a mature encoder when it comes to lossy codecs.

Sirius Stiletto has ogg support, I believe

[pyite69]

I was researching mp3 players, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Ogg listed as a format that the Stiletto can use.

Re:Speex works excellently.

[jZnat]

I've heard that Microsoft uses (used?) it for Xbox Live headset communication, and it works very well in that regard. I doubt they're using a chip, so it's all software-transcoded.

even MacOS is using file extensions now

[r00t]

The old way is still supported on Apple-specific filesystems, but Apple has learned to deal with the non-Apple world. Apple even ships MacOS X with many files being single-fork (data only) with file extensions, where formerly this was not done. An example is fonts, many of which now bear .otf extensions.

Windows shares, FAT-formatted media, and Joliet (Windows CD-ROM format) media are all common.

As for Linux, both magic and xattr are lame. They both cause extra disk seeks. At 5 ms per seek, a directory with 200 files will take an extra second to examine. With 2000 files, that's an extra 10 seconds. File magic is inaccurate and, worse yet, fundamentally unfixable by the user. The xattr feature is usually disabled, doesn't work on all filesystems (hello FAT), isn't even remotely portable, and suffers from xattr marks getting lost by unaware tools.

Re:Branding: "Ogg" vs. "Vorbis"

[donaldm]

> Because the vast majority of file managers need one. HTTP servers need one. Browser plug-ins need one. Programs like ffmpeg need one. etc.

That is only true in MS Windows OS's and some other non *nix OS's. All Linux/Unix OS's have a file called /etc/magic that allows any *nix application to determine what the file type is. While it is possible to setup *nix file managers to look at extensions it is rather pointless if the "magic" file is properly configured although the user can do what they feel comfortable with. Back in the late 1970's I actually used the ".doc" and ".text" extensions for textual documents. Where extensions are used extensively in *nix is in programming (LaTeX/TeX also do this and there are others) because this is an acceptable convention and enables the programmer or user to distinguish between different files without the need for a file manager.

In reality MS OS's have too much dependence on extensions that are a carry over from the DOS days. Unfortunately this dependency makes programs that are written for MS Windows require an extension and this usually carries over to *nix systems when porting is required.