Mozilla Donates $100K To the Ogg Project 334
LWATCDR writes "Mozilla has given the Wikimedia foundation $100,000 to fund Ogg development. The reason is simple: 'Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets.' While Vorbis is a better standard than MP3, everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs. I wonder if wouldn't be better to direct effort to Dirac, perhaps putting Dirac into an Ogg container. No mention was made of FLAC or Speex funding. If more media players supported Speex it would be an ideal codec for many podcasts and audio books. It really is too bad that these codecs so often get overlooked."
Re:More details on grants (Score:5, Insightful)
it barely pays for a good developer for one year.
Well, that depends on the developer and location, I suppose. But anyways, a full time developer on one project? Seems like, presuming the project isn't absolutely huge, that "good developer" should be able to get quite a bit done.
Mozilla and Open Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's not a lot of money, I think the more important detail is that Mozilla is backing OGG. When Mozilla backed PNG, many websites started replacing their old patent-encumbered GIFs with PNGs, and even IE started to support PNG format.
While I agree that Theora is far from complete, OGG does not imply Theora. Theora is simply a free codec that can be stuffed in an OGG container. Once again, Mozilla opens the door to web developers who believe in open standards, and certainly there are development teams who will loathe their MP3s and replace them with unecumbered OGG/Vorbis. Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
This can only be a Good Thing. Small shops that don't want to mess around with licensing fees will have a good alternative to use for streaming audio (and later video). More importantly, those streams can be saved by customers for later use. Proprietary solutions to streaming audio/video usually cripple the player in such a way that the end user can't save the file (Flash for instance).
Mozilla is one of the heavy hitters, IMO. Their financial support and commitment to Open Standards have been a thorn in Microsoft's side since Netscape was released. Way to go Mozilla!
Re:I thought Ogg was dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Better" is relative... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you. But AAC support is going up. It should be becoming less of an issue and when popular formats start changing hands, it's the perfect time for a new disruptive format to come in.
Ogg's biggest problems is that people don't know it exists. Not that it is a bad or good format/container.
Re:Go ahead - throw your money away (Score:2, Insightful)
"Who even uses OGG. Who has even heard of it?"
Exactly.
While a handful of programming geeks are fiddling with OGG because it's open source and not "patent-encumbered" the rest of the world couldn't care less. I can download a copy of WinAmp for free and it plays my nasty evil patent-encumbered MP3s just fine. Same with my inexpensive MP3 player.
Network effects keep Ogg out (Score:5, Insightful)
All music players have to support MP3 in any case, without this the public won't buy. .mp3 files are what people swap, rip, and play. It's been almost 15 years.
So every normal manufacturer will pay the MP3 licensing fees (which are really a software patent tax, but let's not go there), and optimise their hardware for MP3 playback.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Is Ogg therefore dead? Yes, along with all other "funny" formats, on the general-purpose music player.
Where Ogg should excel is in pure software applications, especially in heavily patented areas like VoIP where there is no hardware cost, where it's trivial to add codecs, and where the current state of play penalizes cheaper solutions.
IOW it'll only work in end-to-end solutions where it can be both encoder and decoder, and resolve the issue of patent costs on the whole system.
ASIC (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a hardware issue. Vorbis has similar CPU demands to AAC.
Unless the player has an ASIC that can decode MP3 and AAC but not Vorbis.
Don't think MP3 players are the end of the market (Score:3, Insightful)
An example is the popular Tomtom satnav, which uses Ogg for (presumably) prerecorded speech (and also runs linux).
Although such hidden applications might sound unimportant, they create familiarity for developers and PHBs. So as Linux has crept from turnkey systems - like Tomtom - to phones and netbooks, Ogg may do the same. It's perfectly reasonable to use Ogg as an in-system codec as Apple do with their encoder : it doesn't matter that the end user provides the music in another format. And ultimately, it's all over the place : cheap, license-free and open.
Re:Go ahead - throw your money away (Score:2, Insightful)
So - you'd prefer them to donate money to a project that's already established? In other words, a project that doesn't need money?
Re:Mozilla and Open Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla and Open Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
...there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
...there is one, very popular, site [wikipedia.org] that uses OGG, which will force Microsoft to add the support.
fixed it for ya!
Re:More details on grants (Score:4, Insightful)
MP3 is irrelevant in this (Score:4, Insightful)
The Wikimedia Foundation does not allow MP3. When one of the biggest websites does not use MP3 but ogg, it makes a serious difference.
Thanks,
GerardM
Re:More details on grants (Score:3, Insightful)
That community is also small enough that you'll usually know whom you'd want.
Re:I thought Ogg was dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Worst analogy ever.
MP3s sound just as good as OGG, but have a larger file size. In exchange, OGG files take more processing power to decode. My music player has a huge hard drive... enough for days of music, but the battery only lasts about half a day playing MP3s and half of that playing OGG.
My limited resource is therefore battery life and not disk space, so MP3 wins.
Trying to shoehorn in a restaurant analogy... um, well... My local restaurant has burgers that taste exactly the same as McDonald's burgers but cost more. However, my local McDonald's is very busy and so they force me out of my seat before I can finish my burger. So I go to the local restaurant.
Wow, that was strained and ugly.
Re:lossy is outdated (Score:4, Insightful)
Lossless still uses too much disk space. You can get "transparent" results in double-blind tests with LAME -V0 -V1 -V2 or even -V3. In the rare exceptions where you can hear a difference, you could encode with CBR 320, or even lossless at that point. I've never encountered this case in my own collection, but have heard the samples with the problems.
For me, lossless isn't worth using with it's ~800kbps bitrates... I can fit 3 or 4 times the music on the same player using mp3 and I can't hear the difference.
Re:I thought Ogg was dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Most posters manage to miss the purpose of Mozilla's funding. This deals directly with an issue in the HTML5 specs. Specifically, the fact that HTML5 does not have a default codec for audio/video. It used to be Ogg Vorbis/Theora, but that got canned when Apple claimed they couldn't support it in Quicktime without opening themselves to possible patent lawsuits. To which Mozilla countered that they couldn't support Apple's default of MPEG4 due to licensing issues.
The end result of the debates (and *cough*arguments*cough*) is that support for Ogg was removed from the spec. As of right now, WebKit will support Quicktime formats (+user installed Ogg plugins) while Mozilla will support Ogg. What Mozilla is attempting to accomplish with this grant is to propel forward the use of Ogg in public places like Wikipedia. If they can gain enough of a market presence, they probably figure they can make Ogg the defacto standard for HTML5 audio/video. Much in the way MP3 became the defacto standard for music by being positioned in the market at the right time and place.
Re:I thought Ogg was dead (Score:1, Insightful)
Ogg's good, and I really hope something open comes along, beats the fuck out of Flash Video, and takes all its customers.
I fucking hate Flash video. The Web is not for closed media. A format with Flash's popularity should either be open-source or excellently supported on all platforms.
Even worse, it's just a wrapper for an MPEG stream, which is already simple enough to embed. Apparently everyone decided to follow YouTube by complicating shit with Flash instead of just using better-supported formats like MPEG, WHICH FLASH WRAPS ANYGODDAMNWAY.
Re:Don't think MP3 players are the end of the mark (Score:3, Insightful)
Then the customer won't be using Ogg.
You can use cheaper, mass produced hardware with on chip support for mp3 or mpeg formats far easier than putting a CPU fast enough to deal with Ogg on the device.
Decoders for existing common formats are already built into lots of silicon, Ogg just means higher requirements or new silicon designs for no improvement from the users point of view. You phones, ipods and netbooks aren't going to include audio/video hardware good enough to tell the difference between the formats, but the manufacture IS going to notice the increased production cost. Sure TomTom uses it, but they already have to have a fairly fast processor so they can do routing calculations on the fly, supporting Ogg on the side is easy enough in the spare cycles which get powered by your car rather than a tiny battery. Your phone/ipod isn't going to do that without silicon to do it specifically since using the CPU would result in battery life times on the matter of minutes rather than hours and days.
And for reference, Linux ran on PC, laptops and 'netbooks's long before TomTom had a product, let alone a product running Linux.
I wish people would stop thinking these random little devices running Linux are what made it popular, especially since VERY FEW people actually know what these devices run, and even less actually care.
You state at the end 'ultimately, its all over the place'
But its not, I'm unaware of any device that plays Ogg other than my PC. I'm certainly not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying that I as a techie who watches this sort of stuff could not name a device with native Ogg support so its not really all that popular. My iPhone doesn't, my Windows Mobile PDA wasn't fast enough to play Ogg, played MP3s fine though. I can't go buy an Atmel microcontroller with a Ogg decoder onboard for my projects, I can get one with an mp3 decoder though. I can find assembly for doing the decoding of MP3s on higher end MCUs such as atmegas, avr32s, and PICs with my first google search, can't say the same for Ogg. You specify the TomTom above, but no one other than a few select people know that, its not like its on the cover of the box in big bold letters, but the Windows compatibility logo on the other hand is.
When normal everyday gas station attendants and Toll booth jockies walk around talking about all the Oggs they have on their music players or they downloaded yesterday, THEN its all over the place, right now its an endangered species at best.
Re:More details on grants (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. On the one hand, $100,000 is serious money. On the other hand, it barely pays for a good developer for one year.
A good, experienced encoder optimization engineer would cost a lot more than that as a contractor or as an employee ($100K salary, maybe, but a whole lot more with benefits, overhead, and decent quality gear to evaluate video quality with).
The challenge for Theora is to get competitive "enough" ("enough" being specific to use ) versus H.264 and VC-1 not as they are today, but as they'll be in the timeframe of those improvements. There's a whole lot more then $100K being spent by a variety of companies and groups to squeeze improvements out of the commonly used standard codecs as well.
Theora is a weird enough of a design I don't have a clear intuition of how good it could be. Lacking bidirectional prediction (B-frames) is a pretty big limitation out of the gate. But there's no doubt lots of room for it to be improved compared to where it is now.
Re:MP3 is irrelevant in this (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, because everyone is going to Wikipedia for audio or video clips.
Hint 1: no one goes to wikipedia to watch videos or listen to music.
Hint 2: Of the 5 people that did go to wikipedia looking for audio or video, the stopped when they realized it was in some silly format they didn't have a driver for.
Hint 3: I reference wikipedia several times a week as a starting point for finding authenticated information and I have never seen a video or sound file on Wikipedia.
Its a large website, not anywhere near the largest.
Its not a media website, its an information website which means naturally there will be media included, but the mass of the site is text.
Finally, if it made a serious difference, we'd see Microsoft trying to buy their way into it.
Stop trying to make Wikipedia out to be more important than it is.
Re:According to whose tests? (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's see some sources to back that up.
You first.
Re:To the geek, everything looks like code. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree you need an understand of how the human body/mind perceives sight and sound to work on perceptual encoding schemes.
However, I disagree that you need to understand "the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production". You need those things to create certain audio/video content. You don't need them to engineer what is essentially a transmission medium.
The designers of FM radio didn't need to be versed in music theory or be able to compare and contrast the styles of Beethoven and Chopin. Neither do the developers of video codecs need to appreciate the finer points of storytelling. Basically, you don't need to know how the signal was produced, or whether the signal is fine art, you just need to know how to efficiently represent the signal in a way that humans can't notice the difference from the original source.
To be sure, the knowledge required is cross-disciplinary. Designing a video codec at a minimum will use knowledge from signal processing, computer programming, biology, etc. But that doesn't mean you need a small army, just the right textbooks and research papers.
Where you DO need folks like broadcasters and content creators is when you are trying to put your codec into an application for their use. But that application first requires that you have a working technology under the hood.