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."

money talks

[joe_bruin]

Ogg Vorbis is gaining popularity mostly because of the price per unit. When you make millions of dolls a year and you have to pay a $0.10 licensing fee per unit if it plays voice prompts in MP3 format, that starts to get pretty expensive. If WMA, AAC, MP3, or any other codec was cheaper and did not require significanly more flash memory to store, they'd be using that instead.

Re:MP3 License

[mrchaotica]

Perhaps the chip can decode both Vorbis and MP3.

Re:Informal poll

[delire]

While the name is memorable, it does pose problems where 'branding' is concerned. I've heard people refer to it as "Ogg", "Egg", "Vorbis" and "Egg Vorbis".

IMHO they should drop the 'Vorbis' (clearly the despotic leader of the gentle Ogg race) and just go for 'Ogg'. This would also tie it neatly into the .ogg extension, which is of course the primary contact people have with the format itself.

The maddening problem of Ogg Theora having a .ogg extension also is, of course, another conversation altogether..

Re:money talks

[Technician]

It is no longer a dime anymore. The IC prices are not listed online, but the per device prices are for hardware items.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/hardware.html [mp3licensing.com]

At the bottom of the page is tha item that unless you buy chips with the license, the minimum for doing it yourself is $15,000 USD. If you are making a limited quanity of an item, the minimum can be a showstopper unless you buy chips from someone else, which may also be a little expensive. Dropping MP3 can save a chunk of change since a free alternative exists.

It's the PNG/GIF thing all over again.

Openness == Interoperability

[headkase]

This highlights the reasoning that large corporations such as IBM, Novell, and Sun have adopted open source methods: it lowers their bottom line. They pay programmers to work on open-source projects and they more than recoup the costs through savings in other areas such as interoperability. Open-source breeds open-standards and when basic infrastructure such as audio support is basically "free" then costs are lowered more by using common-infrastructure between manufacturers vs. constantly reinventing-the-wheel or developing your own library of common code/components. Reiterating simply, it's cheaper to pay programmers to develop free infrastructure code and give it away to reap higher profits from reduced costs in other areas such as interoperability.

Re:MP3 License

[MBCook]

I think this is the whole reason. If someone is looking for a chip that does Ogg, they can choose this one. If they are looking for a chip that does MP3, they can choose this one.

Business wise, which is better? Selling an MP3 decoder chip for $0.10 each (just a guess), or selling an MP3/Ogg decoder chip for $0.10 each? Since there are no patents, adding Ogg support is free, but adds value. Lots of people may want chips that can play MP3s (GPS, Cell Phones, MP3 players, calculators, EVERYTHING plays MP3s), but how many would buy a chip that only did Ogg? I doubt that market is nearly as large. Added value.

That's my guess. Your product (possibly with a little bit of extra programming) could even use both. MP3 for things you want at a higher quality, Ogg for things less important. Maybe you are upgrading your old product. You can keep all the old samples MP3 and just add the new samples as Ogg. Who knows.

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

[karnal]

And this explanation above is exactly why the common consumer could give a shit about .ogg

When someone talks about YouTube at work, I know they don't care about the codec or container. That's why ogg needs to be simpler name-wise.

Seriously though, I understand that it has it's uses, but for the "present time", mp3 is where it's at. Hopefully this chip makes a dent, but I'd bet money that mp3 will remain the name of the game for music for the masses for years to come.

Change the name

[fred fleenblat]

Not to be trite, but the very name of the format is a hindrance to adoption. The pronunciation is not immediately obvious, it's hard to spell correctly unless you stare at it for a while, and it doesn't seem to be related to audio, music, compression, or any other earthly topic.

Okay, sure they probably gave it a weird name on purpose, but maybe it's just time to not be weird any more.

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

[iabervon]

The real issue is that people use extensions based on the container format, which is totally irrelevant to anything. Why would you ever care that your file uses the Ogg container, but not care what codec it uses or even what sort of media is encoded in it? I give all of my Ogg Vorbis files the extension ".audio", same as my mp3 files. Any software that's likely to be able to play them is going to be able to tell from the file contents what container format it uses. But it's useful to me to know whether I should be playing a file with a music player or a video player.

Of course, I think most people would be more comfortable giving their Ogg Vorbis files the extension ".mp3", since that's commonly and unambiguously used for files containing only audio.

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

[toleraen]

Can you name a portable music player (generally referred to as an "mp3 player") that doesn't play mp3s? Even if it isn't superior in every way, it is where it's at. And that's the problem.

iPod

[spacemky]

This is stupid, but until the iPod can play Ogg Vorbis, it'll never be truly mainstream. It'll stay a geek format forever.

call it og3

[chrwei]

.avi and .mpg have the same problem. avi and mpeg are also the containers that can contain many different codecs; like XViD, DivX, raw DV, MPEG version 1, 2, and 4, motion JPEG and many others; some are somewhat compatible like XViD, DivX, and Mpeg4, some not. the containers have their own ways of allowing a player to know what codec is in the file so that it can be played.

Hell, .mp3 is an mpeg as well, they(0) just gave it a different extension so as to not confuse people. Why not do the same thing with ogg vorbis? Call it .og3, the masses might even think it's a new version of mp3 and take to it very quickly.

(0) - you know, they, those people that do things.

AVI does the same thing.

[cduffy]

AVI is a container format; you can have any number of codecs stored within an AVI file. Same thing for WAV.

Why is this a problem for Ogg but not AVI?

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[dave420]

I haven't heard those artifacts with MP3s since Xing fell into the dust and people started using the LAME encoder. I don't care about formats too much, so I keep my music in MP3. I like to choose my player for my media, not have my media choose my player. iTunes is pretty good.

Re:that breaks file extension association

[cduffy]

What kind of idiot OS uses file extensions for application association? That means you can't convert a file to a different format without renaming it (and breaking all external links/shortcuts/references) -- stupid! And why should the filename (which is fully user-modifiable even for my grandma^WCEO) be lumped in with the type metadata (which should be user-modifiable only by people who know what they're doing)?

Linux has magic (and xattr support, perfect for storing MIME types); MacOS has had filesystem-level metadata for ages, long before it got the X on the end of its name. I'd hope Microsoft would support something else by now -- after all, don't they typically get things moderately right by 3.0? Let the stupid convention die; the folks who care about finding an elegant solution are doing something else already. [Obviously, on Linux this only refers to a subset of file managers and desktop libraries].

(Just to be clear, I'm only half serious. But then, I *am* half serious).

Re:AVI does the same thing.

[jZnat]

It's the same problem for Ogg (commonly associated with Vorbis), AVI (ass. with DivX and Xvid), WMV (different versions of WMV, WMA, MS-MPEG4, etc.), QuickTime (ass. with Sorenson and now H.264/AAC), and pretty much any other container that holds more than one type of audio and video codec. The non audio/video geeks rarely if ever understand the difference, and the only time it hits them is when they get example files and can't play some of them due to a lack of codecs or software.

Re:AVI does the same thing.

[k8to]

And you blame this on the existence of container formats?

Blame the user interfaces of the toosl and shells for being so unhelpful that users are forced to rely on extensions to guess what files contain.

Oh my god, zip files can contain *anything*!

Re:OGG is the Game Industry's Favorite Format

[evilviper]

Another advantage with ogg over mp3 is that it supports more than 2 channels.

Vorbis can encode to as many channels as you want, but nobody has ever worked on the multi-channel joint encoding, so the bitrate is rather poor on more than 2 channels, and codecs like decades-old AC3 are superior.