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Music Media

The Future of Ogg Vorbis 229

Posted by Hemos from the patent-free-royalty-free dept.
Brett writes "The author of MAD, the fixed point MP3 decoder comments on what is wrong with Ogg Vorbis, with a response from jack, one of the founders of the format. "Ogg Vorbis may be the holy grail of patent-free audio compression, but there are some serious issues blocking its path to widespread acceptance. Unfortunately most of us are powerless to correct the situation; the problems must be addressed by Vorbis' creators. " The rest of the of the story is currently running on K5." And Jack's response is enlightening as well.
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The Future of Ogg Vorbis More

The Future of Ogg Vorbis

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  • No specification (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, the problem is that there is no specification
    of Ogg Vorbis. There we go, whole problem in one line.
  • As a consumer, it's more important that the standard that are adopted for me don't interfer with my daily life. Using Mp3 or OV or just plain WAV isn't going to be my decisions anyway. I can only vote with my dollars, but I won't be paying for any of these system regardless. This is one decision the slashdot crowd should not make. Do some consumer or gallop polls.
  • Fixed point MP3 decoder? Is that like Fractint on the PC, which was much faster than anything else because it used integer operations?

    What is the fastest MP3 decoder (assuming output quality is moderately important, but not everything)?

    • Re:Fixed point MP3 decoder (Score:4, Informative)

      by mukund ( 163654 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:22AM (#3415011) Homepage
      Fractint was fast with integer operations, cause in those days, integer operations were traditionally much faster than floating point operations on the x86 platform.

      The fixed point implementation of Vorbis would be very useful for embedded hardware where floating point support is usually not available on its CPUs.
      • Fractint was fast with integer operations, cause in those days, integer operations were traditionally much faster than floating point operations on the x86 platform.

        Yeah, this used to matter a lot. I remember once seeing integer-only code for drawing a circle on an Apple II. This was in 6502 assembly language, which doesn't have floating point. Neither does 8086 assembly language [no I'm not counting the 8087 bridge instructions], which explains why Fractint was such a win.

        Even when the 486DX came with an integrated x87, it pretended that the FP logic was still on a separate, optional chip - and as a result, floating point access sucked in a number of ways - specifically for context switching - the FP registers are really slow to load / unload in bulk. I guess Intel finally fixed this with new instructions in the PIII; AMD meanwhile seem to have given up on the x87, re-implementing FP math (incompatibly) with the 3DNow! instruction set.

  • Emacs (Score:3, Funny)

    by zerosignal ( 222614 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:21AM (#3415009) Homepage Journal
    Sorry for the rambling. Writing in this little box is a little difficult and is not nearly as much fun as Emacs :). If anyone has any questions regarding you can contact emmett@xiph.org or myself if I don't respond to here.
    Can someone please teach this guy how to use 'copy and paste'!
    • His browser is running under X.

    • Well, I'm not sure what browser he's using, but ctl-e ctl-e under lynx launches your default browser, and I'd be willing to bet that some of the other browsers out there have the same functionality.

  • to go with his whine.

    In his article he states:

    Unfortunately it is neither highly optimized nor well-suited for all platforms, particularly embedded systems and other hardware lacking native floating-point support.

    'Tremor' is the name of a fixed-point implementation optimized for certain embedded systems. Xiph.Org has recently begun to commercially license this implementation, but it is not otherwise freely available.

    I suppose he has a legitamate complaint that the specs aren't complete...but that's really up to the author. They're providing a drop in library that's free. Try getting that from Freuhoffer.

    His other point seems silly to me. Honestly...what kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player in it? Your microwave? A candy dispenser? I mean honestly... if you're going to make a player for music, you really should have the hardware support. (They don't rip the computers out of a microwave and try to adapt them to portable MP3 players.

    • Re:The author of that article needs some cheese... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zachary DeAquila ( 31195 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:29AM (#3415033) Homepage
      What kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player? How about a car stereo? Like, say.. an empeg? Which doesn't have a much in the way of CPU, including the fine lack of a floating point processor?
    • Honestly...what kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player in it? Your microwave? A candy dispenser?

      Seems silly now, but what if someone makes a talking microwave, or a talking candy dispenser. Compressing the audio files, even if it is just a voice, would save space.
      • Hey, at my school they just built a new dorm last year that has apartment-like rooms in it. When I moved in I was suprised to find my microwave telling me I had a message. I thought WTF? Why is my microwave telling me I have a message? So I hit the message button like it told me to, and I got to hear half a conversation about hardware that the guy who was installing it must have been having.

        Anyway, talking microwaves exist now. Why? I have no idea.

    • Most embedded systems don't have an FPU (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pslam ( 97660 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:42AM (#3415074) Homepage Journal
      See my comment here. [kuro5hin.org]

      For example, I am not aware of any flash portable pocket player that has an FPU. That's because it's entirely possible to do MP3/WMA in integer. Nobody is going to fit an expensive and battery draining processor into their product just to support an extreme minority codec.

      By using floating point for the algorithms, libvorbis is ruled out from nearly all embedded devices. At the moment it pretty much only runs (in real time) on PC/Mac systems.

      • Re:Most embedded systems don't have an FPU (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Skuto ( 171945 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @08:09AM (#3415174) Homepage
        >Nobody is going to fit an expensive and battery draining processor into their product just to support an extreme minority codec.

        >By using floating point for the algorithms, libvorbis is ruled out from nearly all embedded
        >devices. At the moment it pretty much only runs (in real time) on PC/Mac systems.

        The way you state this sounds like as if Vorbis can't be done with integer-only artihmetic, which is false.

        The reference implementation uses floats, because it makes the code easier to understand (that's what the article indirectly is about!), but there's no reason why you can't have integer decoders (and they already exist...)

        --
        GCP
        • The way you state this sounds like as if Vorbis can't be done with integer-only artihmetic, which is false.

          Sorry, didn't mean to have that impression come across. The main problem is that it's going to take a long time to rewrite all of the algorithms for integer. It's a shame really, because it would have taken just about as long to write it in integer in the first place. Floating point isn't the magic bullet everyone makes it out to be - it doesn't eliminate truncation and it certainly doesn't eliminate word size issues.

          Actually, I find DSP code written in integer easier to understand because you can see exactly where the author is taking care of those issues much more clearly. In floating point it's all a bit magic, and in most cases they just didn't realise what's actually going on.

          There's integer decoders for MP3 and WMA (and all sort of other codecs), so I agree there's no particular reason Vorbis couldn't be either. In fact, there are integer implementation of Vorbis - the trouble is Xiph want to sell them. Fair enough, but hardly anyone's going to buy it, and you've got to weigh that against the market penetration you'd get if it were free. Maybe they've got it right, but it still annoys me that, for example, I couldn't add Vorbis to an empeg car player because integer Vorbis isn't free, and I don't have the spare time to write an integer version.

    • I mean honestly... if you're going to make a player for music, you really should have the hardware support. (They don't rip the computers out of a microwave and try to adapt them to portable MP3 players.

      For embedded, you want as cheap as possible while still able to do the job. The CPUs commonly used in embedded designs often don't have floating point capabilities - too much silicon, too little need. Complexity means not only unit cost but power usage and cooling requirements.

      Sure, you can ship a machine with a 486DX instead of an ARM, but the optimal solution is to figure out how to use fixed point. Software-emulated floating point won't cut it either - too inefficient. In the embedded world, "inefficient" doesn't mean "oh well, just so long as the CPU is fast enough to handle it", it means "unit cost is higher than necessary since we should have been able to get away with a slower CPU".

    • Honestly...what kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player in it?
      How about a car stereo? How about a portable Nomad-type Vorbis player?

  • Mentality (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jeroenb ( 125404 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:22AM (#3415012) Homepage
    From the Vorbis guy's response it's clear what the problem is: The idea is great, the plan is good, but the deliverables just take time to materialize. Nothing bad about that, it's true for practically every piece of software (or related, like the Ogg Vorbis specification.)

    Regardless of whether the author of the K5 piece is right about the points he discusses, the Ogg Vorbis creators should take his criticism to heart instead of dismissing it. It's not about whether all those points are valid, so trying to prove that they are not doesn't accomplish anything. They should understand that apparantly they have a problem communicating their plans to their possible supporters from the development community and that what they are doing apparantly makes a strange impression.

    They should be glad someone took the time to actually write this down and complain instead of just forgetting about their project and doing something else.
    • Yea, I agree. MAD is easily the BEST software mpeg audio decoder currently available. Its quality is simply amazing, so I can't see why the OGG people wouldn't do what they could to help him implement the same for their format.
      • Yes but you knowing that - and enough people knowing that to convince the other to keep on supporting it are two seperate things.

    • Re:Mentality (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      Jack mentions that one of the implementations only plays files up through beta 4. That means that something changed at that point in the file format. In part, they didn't release a full specification, most likely, because then their later versions would break compatibility with it. It makes sense to only release an official specification with your version 1.0 release, where you have worked on it enough to believe that you can avoid breaking compatibility in the future. Similarly for getting standard bodies involved; there are plenty of things where there's a "official standard" that is not quite right, because not all issues had been resolved when the standard was made.

      Also, it seems like the Ogg Vorbis people will only write up a specification if they think anyone is interested in reading it. It's obviously a lot of work, and, if they didn't think their format would be implemented by other people, they would just work more on their own implementations instead. It's not particularly useful for people to complain about the lack of a specification (since they know it hasn't gotten done), although it is probably useful to hear that people still care.
    • Actually, you can make an argument that OV is showing up to the party just as the police are chasing everyone off and no one cares for party tricks any more. (Maybe that part about the police is a little *too* good an analogy...)

      In any case the reality is that I'm not sure the world needs another audio compression method. I'm not even sure the ones we've got will be anything but a curiosity in another year or two: With Moore's law still making networking faster and storage bigger and cheaper, it's possible that the preferred audio format may simply be raw WAV rips of the CD Audio tracks. The nice thing about that is that even the technologically illiterate can ow play high-quality audio without having to concern themselves with codecs or optimized encoding parameters to ensure good quality when ripping/encoding. The best way to make the encoding problem go away is simply to make encoding go away. With cheap 160 GB drives already on the market, this *will* happen: audiophiles first, then many of the rest of us as prices continue to fall...

  • Barriers to acceptance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lushman ( 251748 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:23AM (#3415019)
    I can see one main way for Ogg to gain widespread acceptance quickly - as the sound track of your run-of-the-mill, MPAA-angering DiVX. MP3 soundtracks only allow for 2 channels, whereas Ogg will allow for n. The main thing that pisses me off about DiVX is the lack of 5.1.

    Imagine how widespread Ogg would be if it was the favored soundtrack of the DiVX generation.

    • multichannel divx (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 2br02b ( 448267 )
      Not really, divx only specifies the video format. You can plug in any sound codec you want to, including AC3. Here's a nice guide [doom9.org]

      • Re:multichannel divx (Score:2, Interesting)

        by phreak404 ( 241139 )
        Multichannel DivX with OGG is not all that its cracked up to be. Good multichannel surround sound will take a bitrate similar to the original AC3 bitrate, so you're transcoding for virtually no space savings, secondly, what exactly will you play this multichannel OGG on? I suppose you can use the Multichannel DirectShow filter and map it to your computer speakers manually, but its going to be a while before you can output it via SPDIF and play it on something 'real'. Hence the advantage of AC3. For 2 channel tracks, I suppose if you like the sound of OGG better, or wanted to use a lower bitrate, that would work, except for all of the lame bugs in OGM files.
        • Okay, this is interesting, tell me more. Does ogg not encode at a lower bitrate with acceptable quality versus AC3? And if not, why do you say that the bitrate would be similar? What if we were to merge the two surround channels, or use a lower bitrate in the rear speakers, or do joint stereo, or something? All these would lower quality, but if you're watching a DivX movie, you accept a slightly lower-quality version, compared to DVD. Still a big step up from 2 channels. The big thing for me is getting that center channel going, the rest is just a bonus.
          Also, how would you go about getting the 5 channels out of an SPDIF connector using ogg? Shouldn't part of the spec be to be able to do this? Would it have to decode and re-encode in DD format in able to do this? If this were the case, I could possibly see the advantage of AC3, as the original source would be encoded in AC3, you decode and re-encode in ogg, then decode and re-encode in AC3 again... Quite an ordeal to save a few megs. But getting 5-channel audio working for movies would be a great feat for the Vorbis team, and I think it's a goal worth shooting for. Who knows, maybe three years into the future the MPAA will be streaming movies to your TV in 5.1 with OGG and DivX. It could be done.

    • Widespread acceptance? Yes, making OggVorbis the audio standard for divx would make that... 5.1 would be nice.

      However, is this what 'we' really want? Because if Ogg becomes associated with DivX and associated and therefore ends up getting noticed by those sweet lads and lasses at RIAA... then what chance is there of seeing widespread use of Ogg in commercial applications?

      I mean, its all well and nice that the quality is better and all the rest... but if your appliance dont work with it, then its mucho useless, no? How many people apart from the few 'in the know' actually use it?
      The hard truth is that companies will stay away from anything divx-related like it's the black death.

      The way I see it, Ogg needs all the support it can get by all the manufacturers.
      If that means no surround sound on DivX, so be it

      • I disagree that a clean, easy-to-use DivX implementation would not be a Good Thing. It would instantly be adopted by those who traffic in DivX, and as such would gain quite a foothold in the PC industry. If it works well, it will gain a reputation as a Killer App, and you'll see it adopted the world over. Technology will continue to evolve, not because of something the RIAA did, but because new technology is often better than old tech, and when it is better, it is adopted. Nobody is going to start renting videotapes or installing programs on floppies when they can rent DVDs or install from CDs. Why? Speed, quality. The same goes for music. If Sony comes out with headphones that can stream music via PCS or GSM or whatever, from your PC, that sounds really good, and is cheap, you're going to want it, and nothing the RIAA can do is going to stop that. Theirs is to adopt and move forward, because as you can plainly see, they're unable to hold us back.
    • I think the "Barriers to Acceptance" are even smaller:
      3 years ago, Joe User had never heard of even an MP3. Then some friend of his showed him Napster. "So how do I play one of these here MP3s?"
      "Go get WinAmp."
      So now Joe User is skilled in MP3..

      Skip ahead to 2002. "So I got $DownloaderOfTheWeek and searched for my songs, but all I got was these Ogg files - how do I hear them?"
      "Go get the Winamp Plugin..."
      I was never particularly interested in Ogg. I thought it was a stupid name for an unneeded format. (I never understood their logo, either - it looks like Jesus beating the hell out of a snake...)
      But then I put Mandrake on my ThinkPad and ripped a CD using Grip - It used to be with Grip, you got the program, then went out and downloaded BladeEnc or Lame to actually do the ripping, but this version comes with an Ogg ripper.So I tried it out and DAMN, but they sound good. As long as I can get all of my players to play them, I'm in business. Probably, a lot of other people will come to accept Ogg this way, too - MP3s are not so old to most people that they have some sort of strong loyalty - if the stuff they want to hear is in Ogg - they wil download the plugin for their player and go about their downloading. As for ripping and distribution, if Ogg is free and people are somewhat familiar with it, rippers will use it by default - they may even install the WinAmp plugin for you at the same time...
      Just my 2 yen...
      Jim in Tokyo

  • My iPod (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zo0ok ( 209803 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:26AM (#3415024) Homepage
    Sorry to say it, but I cannot use it on my iPod and with iTunes. I ripped my 125+ audio-cds to MP3 as when I got my iPod.

    I hate it when people comes up with this kind of reasons for not switching to a free format and making the world a better place... but now I do it myself. It is a pity. It is a shame.

    But maybe I am wrong? Has anyone installed Ogg in iTunes, and is there any chans to hack the iPod?

    • Re:My iPod (Score:5, Informative)

      by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:49AM (#3415100) Homepage Journal
      There is Ogg for iTunes!!!!

      http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200 20 424233612407

      and more directly:

      http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/

      "This site is dedicated to open source QuickTime development for popular open source audio and video codecs. We are currently working on Ogg Vorbis, an audio codec developed by Xiphophorus, and MNG, an animation video codec.

      We have just begun the project, expect many changes over the next few weeks. We will offer a site for developers, as well as one for end-users interested in using our software. At the moment, some areas of our site are not yet implemented. "

    • This is totally relevant to the article. The reference Ogg Vorbis encoder is not capable of being run on an iPod. If we want to see Ogg Vorbis on embedded hardware, we need a fixed-point decoder, and if we want a fixed-point decoder, we need complete specs from the Xiph team. That's exactly what Rob Leslie was complaining about.

      On the other hand, there's no technical reason why we shouldn't be able to have Ogg decoding in iTunes. It'll use a little more of your processor than MP3, but it'll work fine.

  • wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrun.gmail@com> on Friday April 26, 2002 @07:31AM (#3415036) Journal
    In regards to the standards bodies, there are really two well known ones, the IETF and the W3C.
    Why, pray tell, would you try to submit an audio codec to the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the World Wide Web Consortium? Why not submit it to one of the 'really well known' and yet APPROPRIATE standards bodies?

    • Re:wtf? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Explo ( 132216 )

      Why, pray tell, would you try to submit an audio codec to the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the World Wide Web Consortium? Why not submit it to one of the 'really well known' and yet APPROPRIATE standards bodies?


      Yes, they should submit to the Microsoft, the standards body that has done good work to correct Kerberos, HTML and several other standards from their initially flawed state;)

    • Re:wtf? (Score:1, Funny)

      by archen ( 447353 )
      because the LAST thing we want is for Mozilla and IE to render ogg files differently! I'm sick of lining everything up with a million tables =P
    • Er... Actualy, yes, Data Formats are Network Standards.

      Check the 'Presentation Layer' of the well known seven layer model. Thus, its perfectly rational to have an audio format aimed at network use be standardised in this way.

      Please also note that MPEG is a Network Standard.

      • Re:wtf? (Score:3, Funny)

        by sharkey ( 16670 )
        Check the 'Presentation Layer' of the well known seven layer model.

        The Taco Bell 7-Layer model? The Presentation Layer is the Cheese, if I am not mistaken.
      • The OSI 7-layer model is useless. It reflects no real-world network implementation other than X.25, which was designed to fit it rather than the other way around (despite the fact that it's a reference model, not an implementation model - anyone who's worked with X.25 knows what a pain some of these decisions created.)

        True story: Dave Clark, of MIT and one of the fathers of TCP/IP, used to teach a class on "The art and engineering of protocol performance" at Interop (back when it only had one name and fit easily in the small San Jose convention center.)
        In one of these classes, someone asked why mapping the 7-layer OSI model to the real-world TCP/IP model was so awkward. He told this true story (he was a member of one of the committees nivolved at the time): When the OSI decided to study the networking problem, they formed seven study commitees, pretty much arbitrarily, to research the problem. They were NEVER intended to define boundaries. But in typical ISO "politics taking precedence over reality", when they got back together, they could not agree on how and where to create interface divisions, so to avoid deadlock, they finally decided to just use the ones they had for the study committees. So there you have it - there are seven layers because there were seven study committees, and that goes a long way to explaining the uselessness of the OSI model.

        Personally, I think we should exorcise this horror of French bureaucracy from every network textbook on the planet. The number of man-hours that have been wasted trying to apply it to the real world (especially since TCP/IP trounced OSI permanently almost 10 years ago now) is staggering. It would be hard to identify a single more damaging and bone-headed idea in the world of networking than the OSI model. It should die, along with pretty nearly all other ISO standards relating to networking and communications. (And yes, I realize that is quite a strong statement from me, but it's true.)
    • The W3C issued PNG as a standard, since they are interested in file formats that are used in the Web. Why not Vorbis?
  • Near the very end of Jack's reply, he says something to the effect of, "If you'd like us to get the spec done sooner, here's where you can send money."

    I'm not too sure how throwing money at the problem will solve it, as it seems to me that time is the real issue. Of course everyone says that time==money, but perhaps in this case not for all reasonable values of "time"?

    -Peter
    • If they have enough money they can hire someone to do the documentation.. shows how little developers normally care about documentation. I know, because i maintain a HOWTO for developers who do not like documentation.. to much work... well.. i can't code.. so then i document.. problem
      is.. i'm not technically enough informed regarding material like OGG's specs and it's use.

      So if someone want's to pick up the gauntlet....
    • I don't think he was clear enough. From what I understand, they need cash to operate, so if they aren't getting enough from donations, they have to spend manpower trying to generate some money, instead of doing the things that are prioritized independent of the need for money.

  • Expectations (Score:2, Insightful)

    by morhoj ( 573833 )
    The entire point in this statement/response is setting expectations. The programmers expects to recieve the same support about the format that he got when he was developing MAD... the format developers, not being commercially funded, spend their time working on the tangible aspects of the application (bugs, libs, etc) and not the supplemental portions (specs). They expect that people would rather have the software to use over some dry RFC...
  • most ppl talking like this should get a life, and if this bunch of OSS-programmers are not able to coordinate the production of software so that users in fact can use it then say hello to microsoft-linux. its over.
    most end-user tools where in fact programmed by at least two people, who could coordinate their efforts. (gimp for example) but as soon as more cooks come in the stuff gets buggy, everyone has different targets, and people think they have to express themselves in producin l33t-stuff that in fact no one needs or can use, other then step back and do nothing. if you dont have people that get money for their work on the product the quality decreases.

    • if you dont have people that get money for their work on the product the quality decreases


      Hmmm, I have to disagree. Most people who don't get money for their work, and do it anyway
      are doing it for the joy of it, usually as a labor of love. The end product is usually BETTER than the work they get paid for, since it's generally not something they care about. Nor do they feel compelled to go above and beyond what they're required to do.


      Money, while a necessary evil (well sort of), degrades a product's quality. One needs only to look to MS for a real world example.

  • I know this is going to sound petty, but I have a problem with the name. I mean, mp3 is short, catchy, easy to remember, and doesn't sound dumb to people that aren't techie. Imagine saying "Look at my new portable Ogg Vorbis player I got for my birthday" to your non techie spouse. "Ogg what!?!"

    • If they dropped the Ogg part it sounds OK. Vorbis for the long name, and .VRB for the file name. 'Vee are bee' doesn't sound too bad. Or maybe .VBS (hmmm... I'm sure if seen that somewhere before, maybe skip that one).
    • Do you run around telling people "Check out the new Moving Pictures Experts Group - Layer 3 player I got!!"

      No, of course not. "OV player" or "Vorbis player" would work just as well.

      (slightly OT)
      I do have problems with stupid product names, though. How could you be a linux advocate and try to steer people (especially large organizations) to a distro called "Phat Linux". The sites for many of these distros are so goofy and unprofessional, it's no wonder the general public doesn't go for more open source software.

      bytesmythe

  • Open-source speech coding (Score:2, Informative)

    by jmv ( 93421 )
    Shameless plug... For some who might be interested in compression voice for VoIP, there's also the Speex voice codec [sourceforge.net]. For voice (not music) it provides good quality at lower bit-stream than Vorbis.

  • Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NiftyNews ( 537829 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @08:18AM (#3415211) Homepage
    The problem with OV is that it doesn't make enough of a jump in compression from its predecessor, the MP3 format.

    MP3s will continue to rein supreme, Iron Chef style, until someone releases a new compression algorythm that saves at least 10x more space. It is too much work to convince MOST people to use other forms of music compression when there is negligable savings (in quality and size) for the average user.

    • MP3s will continue to rein supreme, Iron Chef style, until someone releases a new compression algorythm that saves at least 10x more space

      That reminds of back when ARJ came out as a compression format for DOS. ARJ was superior to PKZIP, but only in a numerical sense. Its compression was only marginally better than PKZIP, which is probably the same reason it did not become a compression standard. On the other hand, if you compare GIFs and JPGs, your premise is confirmed, not only did JPGs blow away GIFs in terms of compression of data, but they also beat out GIFs in other respects as well (JPGs having support for more than 256 colors comes to mind). As a result, JPGs eventually replaced GIFs as a dominant standard for reasonably good image presentation.

    • Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shren ( 134692 )

      until someone releases a new compression algorythm that saves at least 10x more space.

      An order of magnitude more space? Take an mp3 file, and turn it into one tenth as many bits at the same quality level? I doubt that's even possible.

  • Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moonboy ( 2512 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @08:19AM (#3415217)


    • The name. Cool for geeks, but for the general public, it sounds funny. It gives no indication whatsoever about the product and what it's used for. Granted 'mp3' isn't much better, but that leads to the next point.
    • mp3 was "first to market". It is deeply entrenched .
    • Ogg may be better sound quality-wise, but for the majority of mp3 users, mp3's "sound good enough" and Ogg doesn't offer enough of an improvement for people to encode all of their stuff over again.
    • Yes Ogg is FREE but again, the average Joe could care less about Free or Open Source software.

    Sorry if I sound like I'm trolling. I'm not. I'm just being honest.

    • Re:Reasons (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dephex Twin ( 416238 )
      Excellent points. I can ask any of my non-geek friends about Ogg Vorbis and almost guarantee they have no idea what it is. And you are absolutely right about "good enough"-- once they know what it is, they won't really care all that much. Heck, I'd guess even most geeks here don't have any plans in the near future to move everything over to Ogg.

      I think the best hope for Ogg Vorbis is if it is accept alongside MP3. So if every (hardware and software) MP3 player can play .ogg, any encoder/decoder can handle .ogg, etc. (or most of them at least), then people won't have to care about all the MP3 stuff they have going on already. It could eventually evolve to be that Ogg is the higher quality MP3.

      I think that is THE way to get Ogg in the mainstream. Make Ogg and MP3 exist together in perfect harmony.

      mark
    • The name. Cool for geeks, but for the general public, it sounds funny.
      Yeah. Kinda like "Starbuck's." Wasn't that some guy on Battlestar Galactica? Whoah, I feel like a nerd just making that reference. And let's not forget some other lame-sounding geek brands that made no sense and so never took off, like "Napster" and "Vaio."
      mp3 was "first to market". It is deeply entrenched
      That's a good point, but market share matters more when you're talking about tangible goods. A store is going to devote more shelf space to the market-leading product, compounding that product's advantage. But MP3 and Ogg are intangibles, and for them market share isn't a zero-sum game. Player manufacturers don't need to pick -- they can have both.
      Ogg may be better sound quality-wise, but for the majority of mp3 users, mp3's "sound good enough"
      That may be true for right now, but I've seen bit rates of MP3s on file-sharing networks climbing steadily. It seems 128kbit isn't good enough sound quality for most serious traders these days, which means somebody must be re-encoding something. (I know my own ears have gotten sensitive to the "jingle" artifacts in low-bitrate MP3s.) Plus, there's more new stuff to rip every day...
      Yes Ogg is FREE but again, the average Joe could care less about Free or Open Source software
      This has to be the weirdest argument yet. Pay for it / Free. Pay for it / Free. Hmmmmmm. Seriously, OK we're only talking "as in beer" here, but that means a whole lot to a lot of people.

      I was recently visiting some friends in Detroit -- about as "your average Joe" as you can get. They told me, point blank, that they don't buy CDs anymore. They download and burn. The music they listened to was mainly mainstream Top 40 and dance type of stuff, and they were tired of paying the price of a full CD for the one single on it that was any good. So you tell me whether cost matters or not. If recording companies start putting pressure on the people who make MP3 codecs to pay kickbacks in the form of "piracy surcharges," you think nobody will start looking at Ogg?

  • The Ogg reply says that the only two standards bodies they know about are IETF and W3C. Well, what about IEEE [ieee.org]? What about SMPTE [smpte.org]? Those are technical bodies that deal with these kinds of standards all the time.

  • FPU Club (Score:2, Funny)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 )

    I am Jack's rambling reply....

  • Ogg Vorbis is in Winamp 2.80 (Score:5, Informative)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @08:31AM (#3415270) Homepage Journal

    Personally I thought the news that Ogg Vorbis is now shipped with Winamp 2.80 [winamp.com] was the news of they day. Any guess as to how many times over this will double the installed base of computers capable of playing Vorbis-files?

  • Somewhat offtopic remark (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skuto ( 171945 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @08:38AM (#3415303) Homepage
    This is somewhat besides the point, but in case noone had noticed, the latest Winamp 2.80 ships with Vorbis support by default.

    This is very nice because:

    a) no more explaining how to install plugins to less-literate users

    b) it seems that the legal team of AOL considers Vorbis to be patent-safe (they looked into the matter, which is why this lasted so long)

    c) some of the WinAmp developers have become Vorbis freaks :)

    --
    GCP

  • Here's how to gain widespread acceptance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:20AM (#3416119)
    If you want to see Ogg succeed then the easiest way is write a plugin for the "Copy Music" feature in windows media player. Media player uses the stinky WMA by default and has lousy MP3 support (on purpose). Write a plugin encoder/decoder for it and distribute it far and wide. And don't forget ask the user during installation if they want to make it the default.


    It would also help to lobby people like Winamp, LimeWire, WinMX etc. to include Ogg as a recognized format by default making it easier to locate and play music.

    • That's a very significant point. (Mod him up! ;-) And the floating-point reference version would be an acceptable start because Media Player isn't likely to be running on any integer-only embedded processors.

      Which, of course, leaves us with the obvious question: how available are the specs for writing WMP plug-ins?

  • Specifications more important than Implementation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by inquis ( 143542 ) on Friday April 26, 2002 @10:28AM (#3416185)
    What I'm going to say is what software engineers already know.

    The specifications for software are much, much more important than your implementation. If the specifications are written completely and well, the design of said software project will "fall" from the specifications, and the implementation will "fall" from the design. "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact; at best, you will have an incomplete specs document (because of developers who incompletely document their own code), and at worst you will have WRONG specs (because a developer makes an innocent typo that doesn't get caught).

    Sure, the ogg stream format and the vorbis audio format have been frozen for a year; however, code is not self-documenting. One of my wisest professors said that the only man he has known that writes self-documenting code is Knuth, and you might be a good hacker, but you are NOT Knuth. Every mortal man needs specifications and design documents to be able to make ANYTHING out of ANY piece of code; hell, I have some relatively simple Java apps I hacked together six months ago that would read like Greek if I didn't have my specs and my design documents.

    How can anyone expect to reasonably use an undocumented format?
    • "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact;

      But it happens all the time in real life. C, C++, Fortran and Pascal were all specified after the fact.

      Part of the advantage is that when those were being specified, it wasn't just a specification in search of users, they knew that people would use it. Do the implementation first to attract user, and then specify, and there's less of chance you're wasting time.

      Secondly, Algol 60 was specified first, then implemented. Algol 60 had call by name, one of the most complex and painful of means of calling arguments, only because they specified first and then discoved what they had specified. Implementation first means that you can find some of the stupid mistakes first, before you write the implementation.
      • C, C++, Fortran, and Pascal may have been specified after the fact. However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.

        A document describing the grammar of the language + the source code for the implementation of the language (a compiler) is much more descriptive than the implementation (the compiler) alone.

        There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar. The notion that you could conceviably write a useful compiler for a language that you only have knowledge of in an informal manner (i.e. me trying to write a Java compiler from just my knowledge of how the Java language works and not from design documents like grammars) is insanity.

        Also, you mention Algol 60 being specified and then implemented. Two points:

        1. Call-by-name is bizarre, but useful in some cases. Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
        2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.

        Implementation before specification = bugfest.
        • However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.

          To implement any program that reads a file, you have to implement a structure for the file. That's the easy part. It's the semantics - what the bytes mean, instead of how they are ordered, that's the hard part.

          There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar.

          But it's been done. It's not that hard to discover from studying sample code. The tricky stuff is getting the semantics right, and that wasn't clearly specified in C, C++ or Fortran prior to the standards.

          Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?

          Besides the fact that the designer's own implemenation didn't handle it correctly, because it was too much work? Between call by name, and integer labels, I don't believe there ever has been a complete implementation of Algol 60.

          2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.

          The point that you're missing, is that people miss problems in specifications all the time. If you implement first, then you are guarenteed to catch anything that's unimplementable or unusable; if you standardize first, then there's a chance they will pass you by.

          Implementation before specification = bugfest.

          Argument by assertion! How profound. I guess you couldn't find any examples to back up your case, then.
  • I love ogg vorbis, it sounds great, and it being free makes it even better. I will be sooo happy when I can flash upgrade my iRiver Slim X and my wifes iPod to play them, but that may be awhile. The one aspect of Ogg that seems to be the killer app for me is the automatic bitrate reduction. I rip all of my stuff at 320 mp3 for use on my desktop machine, but when I'm jogging, the Slim X has a tendency to skip when playing files of that bitrate. I long for the day when I can downsample the file automatically to 128 for skip protection. Its part of the implementation of ogg vorbis from the beginning, but noone has made an app to do that. For me that would be Ogg Vorbis's killer app, and something that would get me to re rip my cd's into ogg.
  • I was looking at doing some audio hacks with a compressed format. I was trying hard to find an Ogg Vorbis specification but couldn't find any. Eventually, I gave up and used MP3. Even if I had reverse-engineered the Ogg Vorbis en/decoder, without an official specification, there would have been no guarantee that things would have remained compatible or that I wouldn't have missed some important subtlety.
  • I had a discussion on /. with Emmett Plant from xiph.org about the fixed point decoder a couple of weeks ago, thought it might be relevant, you can find it here. [slashdot.org] He makes some interesting, but sometimes short-sighted points about the fixed point decoder.

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