I’m an optimist, specifically for ubuntu and the open source/free software world. One thing that puzzles me is OGG Theora and Vorbis. We see Wikimedia (Wikipedia, wikidictonary…etc) using OGG technologies as well as mozilla, google and opera embracing it. It is included by default in nearly all linux distributions (I say nearly all because I cant think of any that dont but id say some don’t have it). They are the only freely distributable codecs around.
So why am I still unsure about OGG being used worldwide as the standard for audio/video files?
1. It wont be standardized as part of HTML5
2. MP3 although outdated are still installed on more devices sold on the market.
3. No big company is pushing its adoption
4. Even people who support free software have no reason to encode their library into free formats.
5. The ubuntu one music store (going by the meeting at the UDS) more than likely wont offer OGGs as a download option.
6. Google bought On2, so they might push VP8 to the main stage by using it in Google Chrome (the browser and the OS) and on Youtube as embedded HTML5 video.
I think at the moment more can be done to encourage the use of OGGs, comparing sizes and emphasizing the free part is all well and good but it doesn’t push it to the users. Its an aggressive market, MP3, MP4 and WMA all are pushed to the users by massive companies like Apple and Microsoft. Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Solaris, FreeBSD and Opensuse (there are loads i’m not going to list them all) all distribute OGG codecs but it just seems that not many users use them and thats a shame.
Me personally I don’t use them because I have way too much music and video to convert and there wouldn’t be much point because if I convert it all I will have a degradation in quality because each codec removes different parts of the tracks. Plus I have an iPod and that doesn’t play OGGs. (before anyone asks I looked into it and I couldn’t find any OGG players in any of the shops I visited in Ireland)
One thing I have to say as a great side note is that FLAC is the most used lossless codec around and that is such a awesome example of how a free software product can dominate just because its great.
Also worried… Even jamendo dropped ogg…
Well, it will be an uphill battle. With HTML5 I only put OGG on the net because it is just better.
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“Plus I have an iPod”
that’s a choice, like using windows or MacOS, not an excuse !
http://www.learningubuntu.com/tips/top-5-ipod-alternatives-linux-users
You obviously havent been in an irish electronics shop. You have a choice between iPods or zunes and not much else.
I’m not sure either that Linux can be found there, however i’m using it
Most of the iRiver players support Ogg (I think the recent ones include Theora support as well). The one I have also acts as a USB mass storage device, which makes copying files to the player as easy as… well, as easy as copying files to just about anything else. However, I did need to access to a certain Operating System in order to install the alternate firmware to work as a mass storage device on the model I got way back when.
I heard of the iRiver but ive never seen one which is weird.
Have you tried Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/)? It supposedly allows iPods to play ogg vorbis and FLAC files. I haven’t tried it (my mp3 player, a Sansa Clip, supports ogg vorbis and FLAC out of the box), but you might want to check it out.
I looked up Rockbox from what I understand it cant work newer iPods and mine is the newest classic (120GB).
My current player and my previous one both play Ogg Vorbis & FLAC. The current is a Cowon D2. The previous was a Cowon iAudio 7. No, it didn’t break. It was lost/stolen.
America has loads of stuff that we dont have in Ireland. Ive never seen or heard of Cowon at all (Although I never seen a fire hydrant till I went to the UDS)
)
Im so envious of Americas choice. Like you guys have linux computers for sale over there we have just Dell in Ireland (and zareason but they have them weird American keyboards
Cowon – a large company – supports both OGG and FLAC.
Android natively supports OGG – more than a FEW large companies support Android.
Sansa supports OGG and FLAC natively – another large company.
Etc.
As litigation catches up with MP3 _and_ a viable option exists, companies often do what makes business sense.
Forgot!
Let’s face it, as the cost for storage rapidly approaches nothingness, FLAC becomes all the more viable. Why suffer through compressed quality when storage is so cheap?
As I mentioned in one of my other replies, ive never heard of Cowon and they arent available in Ireland from what I can see. And yes I did mention that google have supported Ogg but they also support Mp3/Mp4 in Chrome and Android too. FLAC is awesome I agree but storing an album on 200~MB=Crazines
Shane, I feel your pain
If you want something to play .ogg’s though meteor started selling the htc hero.
Android could be the saviour on that front but I agree with the issue of re-encoding tracks it just degrades the quality.
Would be nice if you could just buy .oggs and have everything just work without needing to think about it.
It would be good if they just shipped wav or flac because then we can just re-encode it to whatever we want. The only problem with that is people are dumb and cant do that.
OGG Vorbis is a good format, roughly on par with MP3. However why should people use it? Well yes, if you record or edit something with free software, it might be a good choice. But if you are only a consumer you can consume MP3 just as fine. MP3 is somewhat patent encumbered, however I believe in Europe it is legal to both encode and decode since software patents are not recognized. IIRC even in USA you can use Fluendo plugin which is free (as in beer). In addition, some people say decoding (i.e. playback) is not an infringement, only encoding is.
OGG Theora is much worse. Its main problem is obvious – it’s crap. To maintain the same quality as some state-of-art codecs (for instance H.264), Theora needs approximately double bit-rate or so. Basically this codec is just a waste of your bandwidth. No doubt people try to stay away from it, even some of those in the free software community.
Theora needs a better compression system I agree but I used it to encode a few movies and I got the same size as if I used Mp4 and I had good quality.
UH. The Ubuntu One Music Store BETTER offer OGG downloads. I didn’t buy a Droid instead of an iPhone for the lack of multitouch.
I was at the meeting at the UDS and I and a few others in the room made the point for vorbis but its up to the partner who they are dealing with for the store.
Can people in Ireland buy things online? Cowon players are available from amazon
Yes we do have amazon but have you ever tried to ship something from america it not only has weird plugs it also costs a hell of a lot to ship.
I understand, but the American 117 Volts can be supplied with a step down transformer built just for that purpose, I use English made equipment where I live and I use a step up transformer to supply the 240 Volts the chargers need, as for weird plugs the transformers usually have the necessary adaptors. for small devices these transformers are not bulky at all and can be transported easily with the charger.
Amazon has a UK website and Cowon should have distributors in Europe so would not be too much of a problem for Amazon to have Cowon players nearby.
This may seem like a lot of hassle but if you really feel strongly about free multimedia formats you should make the effort.
My personal favorite sites to use are komplett.ie , expansys.ie and elara.ie and play.com deliver to ireland too and have great deals.
If it were me though, I would just buy an android phone.. Better value than buying an mp3 player which supports .ogg.
To quote the front page of Handbrake.fr (this could be wrong)
“OGG/OGM: HandBrake’s OGM muxer is just as out of date. It hasn’t been actively maintained in years either, and it too lacks support for HandBrake’s best features. It requires conditionals to work around missing functionality too…only this one gets tested so infrequently the conditionals were never even put in the code, so it just fails when you try to do anything advanced. This one is not coming back either. And yes, we’re aware of HTML 5. For patent-free muxing, HandBrake still has Matroska, which is a much better container anyway.”
The codecs aren’t worth a dime without a complete, up-to-date container. I have OGG support on my Sansa, but I’m finding the OGG container for video has just disappeared.
I will try to address specific comments.
> 1. It wont be standardized as part of HTML5
I believe you are talking mostly about Theora (and not Vorbis). Vorbis is AFAIK the best patent/royalty free codec out there. Also HTML5 is still work in progress. So Theora still might end up in standard if they don’t find anything better and patent/royalty free.
> 2. MP3 although outdated are still installed on more devices sold on the market.
AFAIK, most of the portable music players (except Apple, Microsoft and Sony) contain support for Vorbis/Ogg these days. Ex. Samsung, iRiver, Cowon, Creative, Archos etc.
> 4. Even people who support free software have no reason to encode their library into free formats.
Not sure where you got this impression. I encode all my music to Vorbis these days (for last 2 years). It just sounds better even for casual listener like me. I bought Cowon iAudio 7 because it supports Vorbis.
> 5. The ubuntu one music store (going by the meeting at the UDS) more than likely wont offer OGGs as a download option.
It’s their choice. In the same way as not buying music in non-Ogg format is my choice.
The opposition to vorbis and theora being in HTML5 is from 2 of the biggest players nokia and apple. You forget that the iPods are the most sold in the market. You may encode your music into vorbis but most people I talk to in the community use Mp3s.
I’d like to bring out a couple of points here, too. The main thing is that we’re dealing with a situation that’s a little bit different than web browsing… it’s not like Firefox vs. Internet Explorer. Taking the merits of open source aside, people have migrated to Firefox instead of Internet Explorer BECAUSE it’s better, not because of the philosophy behind open source.
Ogg Theora and Vorbis aren’t, arguably, inherently better than H.264/AAC. I haven’t heard anyone seriously making that argument. At best, they’re said to be competitive at some bitrates. At worst, they’re demonstrably inferior. Free isn’t as compelling of an argument when it comes to comparing quality, especially if people are going to be encoding their prized media in it.
There’s no loss in quality to switch from one web browser to another, the information stays the same in both. But transcoding between lossy video/audio formats comes at the high cost of quality and file size. It makes switching formats a lot more difficult and at a higher cost. Unlike the web where multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing, video/audio really needs *ONE* standard.
Now, H.264 has mostly overcome that. Instead of dealing with DV, WMV, Real, and Quicktime, the professional video industry AND consumers have mostly crystalized behind H.264. It’s in Mac OS X, it’s in Windows 7 natively *or* downloadable free via Flash or Silverlight (which all together form 98% of the computers in the world). It’s used in Bluray. It’s used in Tivo and any number of other set top boxes. It’s emerging all over mobile devices — as much of a victory as Theora supporters claim in Android support of Ogg, keep in mind that it *also* supports H.264/AAC. So what if it’s not free as in Free? If a device manufacturer can license it for $1 a box they make and the general public can go to Adobe or Microsoft and download something at no cost to play it, Theora’s freeness isn’t a good argument. Theora has every single mindshare point going against it.
Like it or not, Ogg was going nowhere before Mozilla started grandstanding on it, and even following the slight uptick in interest in Ogg, people are continuing to add support for H.264 (Vimeo) and degrade support for Theora (Handbrake). What Mozilla has done is temporarily upset the movement towards unified standard (which H.264 is, though not royalty-free), but, along with Google’s purchase of On2, also puts pressure on MPEG-LA to bring reasonable licensing terms to H.264 over the next years.
One other thing to add is that for H.264 to be accepted, it doesn’t have to be an open sourced spec, but just royalty-free. Mozilla has said publicly before that if H.264 were royalty free, they’d support it in the browser. The licensing terms for 2011+ have yet to be announced. With the further push behind HTML5 and both Google and Apple’s weight behind H.264, we can hope that MPEG-LA will at least have the decoder be a royalty free implementation, and leave the income in the encoder/distribution areas.
You know though, with all the demonizing Mozilla has done against H.264, it’s ironic that the rest of the world, open source world especially, has adopted an acceptance of VLC and x264.
You want to know why everyone else is not using OGG already? Look no further than you own answer here:
“Me personally I don’t use them because I have way too much music and video to convert and there wouldn’t be much point because if I convert it all I will have a degradation in quality because each codec removes different parts of the tracks. Plus I have an iPod and that doesn’t play OGGs.”
Even you – who knows about the issues of non-free software – owns a damn iPod to play MPEG-patented music files. (Do you really believe you are legally playing those MP3 files on Ubuntu?) And so, how should you expect anyone else – who does not know the issues – to do otherwise?
Posts like this piss me off, because it shows the real absence of principles. You can see the problems, but you cannot even be bothered to put down your iPod, which locks you to that solution.
spot on
This is what you should do:
1) Your next portable player must support ogg. If stores in your area don’t sell any, buy online. You have many choices, Samsung supports ogg (some models) and even flac (check out Samsung YP-U5).
2) Crappy chinese cheap no brand players almost always support ogg.
See http://wp.me/p50WQ-3U and http://wp.me/p50WQ-3x
3) If I found an iRiver / Cowon player in Argentina, there must be someone selling them in Ireland. That’s Europe, a big market no trade carriers, lots of money to spend.