Ogg Format Accusations Refuted 248
SergeyKurdakov sends in a followup to our discussion a couple of months ago on purported shortcomings to the Ogg format. The inventor of the format, Monty "xiphmont" Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation, now refutes those objections in detail, with the introduction: "Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact." The refutation has another advantage besides authoritativeness: it's far better written than the attack.
watch it... (Score:1, Insightful)
The refutation has another advantage besides authoritativeness: it's far better written than the attack.
coughcoughADHOMINEM [wikipedia.org]
If you're going to make commentary about an argument, try not to use a logical fallacy when doing so...
Re:Well written, and informative, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
And more importantly, they're wrong, in the eyes of its developer.
It's a cogent flame of his critics, but it also exposes what are plainly design differences-- and his critic's non-nuanced eye. You have to appreciate someone that can split hairs so finely when taking a set of arguments apart. I like thinkers.
Re:tl;dr (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to prepend my ignorance in this area, however one thing that occrs to me in your complaint is that isnt this really how the OSI model works? The higher level (container) has the info it needs to pass its payload along to the next level. http, being a payload in the data of IP, and so on. Now I cannot speak to if this makes sense in the contact of media storage, but parsing deep into the media itself would seem to be out of scope of a container, and then end up being a crutch that could break later for yet unimagined content.
Ogg format considered not as good as MPEG (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
When MPEG-1 started it closely followed H.261 [wikipedia.org]. H.261 was very well written. Back in 1994 when Xiph started, MPEG-1 had already been going 6 years [wikipedia.org].
Ogg is full of strange fields and difficult to read structures. The author of the criticism is right to question it, especially when Ogg used similar fields but changed the names. There was never any need to change terminologies. H.261 and MPEG-1 were well written standards but not freely available and included patented technologies. The "not freely available" means that you have to buy it, not that it's secret.
If Xiph wanted to produce a free standard for video coding they could easily have adopted the same terminologies and similar structures, defining their own versions of them and recommending unpatented technologies. Instead they chose their weird terminology and rushed to come out with something different without spending the time to work out how difficult it would be for users to implement and what quality it would give. H.261 and MPEG were backed up by masses of research by companies and universities of which much was freely available in journals and conference proceedings.
The idea that "MPEG was hardly dominant" is the thought of someone who either didn't do his homework at the time or a revisionist. VCD (created 1993) was massively popular in the second half of the nineties, or doesn't that count ?
From the summary:
I wish it had been. If you want to refute a rant, pick some illustrative points and clearly answer them. Don't pick apart the text, all of it, sentence by sentence. Fancy colouring and highlighting don't make it better written.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't say it was good, he explained why it is good.
MPEG-LA bad mouthing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just how much money is MPEG-LA making on their patent pool? How much are they spending on bad mouthing OGG to preserve/increase their income?
Treat any criticism of proprietary product competitors with a very large grain of salt.
Particularly against free competitors since it's legally safer as they often don't have the legal resources to fight half-truths and innuendo.
Good to see Monty's refutation.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Re:tl;dr (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't assume because the OSI model works that way means its the right model for a video container format.
And, given the plethora of systems out there that have had to add functionality to introspect higher layers while routing lower layers, I wouldn't even assume the OSI model is actually the right one for networking, either.
Re:Well written, and informative, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a different kind of flaw, though. Rullgard was arguing that Ogg is inherently technically flawed. Arguing that it's technically fine but unusable due to a lack of documentation is a different argument.
Re:The goal (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this argument is that it somewhat misses the point. MP3 is "good enough" for the vast majority of users at LAME V0/V2. I would venture a guess that 95-99% of persons couldn't ABX at V0 in perfect conditions (expensive amp, DAC, and high-end headphones), yet if we're talking about the use of a DAP and earbuds, it is quite clear qualtiy isn't relevant.
MP3's primary advantage is its effective standardization and universal support in all hardware and software. This single advantage far outweighs any benefit Ogg Vorbis can provide. An MP3 can be played on any DAP, on any operating system (with the right codecs), and all music software. It's therefore the preferred lossy sharing format. On the large music trackers, Vorbis makes up fewer than 1% of lossy downloads by file size and # of downloads. MP3 is the clear preference.
The fact is that, while Ogg Vorbis, may be better than MP3 quality-wise at V0 or 320 CBR, this is not the main point of lossy audio. If your primary concern is quality and archival, you shouldn't use any lossy format. You should use FLAC - it is open source and has superior error detection features (MD5/CRC for each frame, use with Accuraterip to verify any disk).
I use FLAC on my desktop and only download EAC rips with 100% logs, or try to, at least. This ensures that my downloads are "perfect rips", and the encoding process has not reduced quality at all. With a single click, I can verify my FLACs against the Accuraterip database to ensure they are perfect.
No lossy format provides this benefit. If I want to put the music on my iPod, I can convert it quickly with my Core i7 (45 seconds an album). I can convert my entire collectoin in several hours.
So, why use OggVorbis over FLAC?
Re:MPEG-LA bad mouthing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well written, and informative, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Where, exactly, is the boundary line between a file format and its documentation/specs?
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Insightful)
What you are describing is a common ordinary linked list.
None of the containers that I am aware of require you to understand the video data in order to play the audio data, so what the heck are you actually getting on about? That "containers" should be ordinary linked lists?
In reality, thats not fit for purpose. That media file contains at least two stream, and while each stream can be treatable as independent, they can also be treatable as semi-dependent. There exists information that is shared between streams. For example, metadata.
If I am not required to decode the video stream, then you can't put the shared metadata in the video stream. If I am not required to decode the audio stream, then you can't put the shared metadata in the audio stream. So what then?
And thus, the media container is born. Linked lists just don't cut it. These formats are more than linked lists for a real (and I gave only one of them) reason.
Re:The goal (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's exactly what TFA was refuting. Why is Matroska better?
Re:The goal (Score:2, Insightful)
So, why use OggVorbis over FLAC?
Because:
You have a decent (i.e. non-Apple) media player that supports a variety of formats, and Ogg happens to be one of them
[shrug]... That's my reasoning for using Ogg, anyway.
Re:MPEG-LA bad mouthing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that was a load of paranoia. There are clearly technical problems with the format - but according to you any criticism must be funded by the evil MPEG-LA!
Re:tl;dr (Score:3, Insightful)
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode?
Right, so much for Ogg.
This kind of answer, which amounts to "You shouldn't want to do that", is an absolutely certain indicator of a product that doesn't solve the problem that poeople actually have and never will, because when the inadequacies of the solution are pointed out, users are told they should have a different problem.
Every time I have ever been told by anyone anything like that it has been a sure indication that they have simply failed to understand the domain I am working in.