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."
More details on grants (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
If that's all the resources that one of the most prominent open source foundations has to fight proprietary software, we're in trouble.
Anyway, where does one apply for more grants from the Mozilla foundation? Here are the grant amounts for 2007, see if you can read a subliminal message:
- mozdev.org: $10,000
- Parrot: $10,000
- Dojo Ajax toolkit: $70,000
- Jambu: $10,000
- NVDA: $90,000
- creatives commons: $100,000
- seneca college: $100,000
- Gnome: $10,000
- coreboot: $10,000
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The 5 Steps to a Great Startup Idea [fairsoftware.net]
I thought Ogg was dead (Score:3, Interesting)
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
"Better" is relative... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
Now when listening to music on a PC those additional cycles might be a drop in the ocean but what we've seen is a lot of MP3 players skipping the codec because their cheap devices couldn't handle the playback load.
Does Dirac need the money? (Score:2, Interesting)
Dirac is developed by the BBC. I don't think $100,000 is really going to make a bit of difference to them. And if the money has gone to the Ogg project who says that part of it won't go to making Ogg support Dirac from their end?
As far as Theora performance, Wikipedia has this to say:
Sources close to Xiph.org have stated that the performance characteristics of the current Theora reference implementation are mostly dominated by implementation issues inherited from the original VP3 code base
I have no idea if that's accurate or not, but assuming it is it sounds like Theora's performance problems could largely be solved given enough resources to rewrite code. $100,000 isn't a bad place to start.
Brace for the flood... (Score:3, Interesting)
...of "There Can Be Only One, and it's Adobe® Flash®!"/"'Ogg' sounds stupid!" posts...
I can't say I necessarily care for their implementation of the <audio> and <video> tags in the HTML 5 proposals, but at least this'll give a plugin-free and license-fee-free way of doing audio and video in Firefox and Opera...and supposedly Safari.
Of course, Safari only supports "Apple Quicktime" as usual, but I'm guessing that installing XiphQT would let it work with the same media as Firefox and Opera...
I imagine the DirectShow plugins for Ogg Vorbis/Theora might eventually solve the problem for those who insist on using IE, too, if Microsoft ever catches up to HTML5.
Re:"Better" is relative... (Score:3, Interesting)
Vorbis is attractive (Score:1, Interesting)
Vorbis lose out in power consumption if your base of comparison is player with a dedicated mp3 silicon vs running a software implementation of vorbis on a generic CPU, which was a realistic scenario a couple of years ago, I agree. Because it's a more advanced and better sounding codec, vorbis requires a bit more memory (or to be more precise, the bounds are looser). There's been talk about a 'mobile profile' but I don't think anything came of it. I think it's a bit late anyhow, if we'd had one from the beginning things might have turned out different.
None the less, I have several gigabytes if vorbis on my iAudio D2, a two hour commute per day, and I recharge it on the weekends. Vorbis wins every day in my life.
Re:I thought Ogg was dead (Score:5, Interesting)
You thought wrong. [xiph.org]
Re:Mozilla and Open Standards (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it was a good, positive thing that an alternative to GIF was created and widely implemented. However, let's be realistic about what it accomplished. As a user, there was never a viable option to run a browser without GIF support; if even one site you visit still uses GIFs, then you need a browser with a GIF decoder built in. As a web developer, the situation wasn't all that different. Say you're a professional web developer, and you're hired to do a site that has to work in IE x.y+ and Firefox z.w+. Well, you look at whether the browsers you're required to support will support PNG at all, and you also look at whether they support all PNG features properly, and whether you need the features that aren't supported properly in IE. Yes, you might be able to do the job without having a patent-encumbered LZW encoder. So there was a time when PNG was completely nonviable because of complete lack of browser support, possibly followed by a certain time when you might be able to get away with not having a patent-encumbered algorithm on your web development machine, and now the present period when the LZW patents have expired. That middle period was probably not just short for most professional web developers, it was probably nonexistent.
The basic problem was that there only had to some tiny number of cases where PNG wouldn't work, and that was enough to make anyone running a commercial web site demand that the site be designed so that it would work in a browser that supported GIF.
Similar issue with audio codecs. I recently digitized my LP collection, and also transferred my CDs to my computer so I could stop having piles of CDs around my living room. I decided to encode everything in a lossy format, because I wanted my backups to be a reasonable size, and I personally can't hear the difference between mp3/ogg levels of lossiness and CD quality. I was all fired up to use ogg, until I started confronting the realities. I have a portable mp3 player that works with mp3 but not with ogg. That simple fact was enough to make me decide on using mp3. It doesn't matter that my linux box supports ogg, and my network appliance I use as a music server also supports ogg. All it takes is one place where support is lacking, and I bite the bullet and go with the non-free format. And just as the LZW patent has already expired, the patents relating to mp3 are also starting to expire.
I'm glad that both png and ogg were created, but I don't think we should overestimate what they accomplished during the limited time when they were alternatives to patent-encumbered formats.
Re:More details on grants (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm, what am I supposed to see in this subliminal message? Is there some conspiracy in Mozilla that I'm unaware of, or is this just the typical response you get from someone when they don't consider the project to be 'grassroots' enough anymore since it became successful.
The Mozilla foundations job is to support the web and standards relating to it, I don't really see them preferring any one organization, mentality or political opinion. They make are given X amount of money per year, they use Y amount, and X-Y = Z. Some portion of Z is given out to other projects that are of the same basic alignment as the Mozilla Foundation or are directly beneficial to the Mozilla Foundation. Are you just pissed off that your fanboy project isn't in the list or do you actually have something to show us?
I see: Mozilla giving money to projects that are likely to benefit them in some way, you see ?
Re:"Better" is relative... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been introducing my friends to Oggs whenever possible.
My biggest thing about them is that historically MP3s have had terrible support for seamless transitions between tracks ("gapless playback"), and I listen to tons of music that relies on not being able to hear those transitions: Pink Floyd, Dream Theater, movie soundtracks, classical music...
In order to have gapless support with MP3s, you need to use LAME to encode them, then use a LAME-aware decoder that supports LAME's gapless playback headers, like foobar2000 or Rockbox. But then if you play those in a non-LAME-aware decoder, like most non-Rockbox portable players, then you get a gap. The only way around this is LAME's (rather fragile) gapless switch, which extends the packets to end the song on a packet boundary.
Meanwhile, Oggs have no packet restrictions, so they inherently support gapless playback with no extra tricks.
Shameless plug (since not everyone has sigs enabled): I wrote FlacSquisher [sourceforge.net], a program to convert FLACs to Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format. Then I can rip my CDs to FLAC for home-listening use, then encode them en masse to Oggs for portable use. Try it out! :)
Re:Network effects keep Ogg out (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget games, iff you can ship the decoder with your software, you might aswell go ogg because vorbis has a slightly better file size at reasonable encoding and there are no downsides.
Re:Go ahead - throw your money away (Score:5, Interesting)
I encode my stuff in Ogg as only I am going to listen to it. If I want to play it on an MP3 player I'll just buy a Samsung which are well priced and specced and play Ogg. I don't know of any popular Linux music player that doesn't play both MP3 (sometimes with extra download) and Ogg transparently. A "programming geek" doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks. This is why he is superior to you.
Phillip.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
To the geek, everything looks like code. (Score:2, Interesting)
You need a deep understanding of how the mind perceives sight and sound before you can usefully begin work on compression.
Some sense of the history and aesthetics of film, video, and audio production - and reproduction.
This is what broadcasters like the BBC bring to the table.
The major studios.
The record labels.
You need experts in many disciplines.
You need controlled experiments with different audiences in different environments.
The coder won't be accomplishing much of anything on his own - and paying his salary is likely to be the least of your problems.
Re:Mp2 is not compatible with mp3 (Score:1, Interesting)
You're not reading what you're writing.
MP2 consists of only the time domain to frequency domain translation.
MP3 takes that translation and adds additional compression in the frequency domain. Hence it has a "hybrid filter bank".
That's why MP2 players can play MP3. It sounds like crap when you do, but you can discern the basic audio.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like PNG? (Score:3, Interesting)
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
...Just like PNG?
I remember when it was just a nutty outlier standard that hardly anyone ever heard of or supported. Web images were either .GIFs or .JPGs, or if you had tons of bandwidth and room, .BMPs, maybe .TIFs in some bizarre cases. "What's a .PNG?" they asked. "An image standard? Why would we need that? Patents? Ha! Good luck trying to oust the .JPG standard!"
Today, .PNG is supported by every major browser (although only eventually kicking and screaming by IE after Firefox used it as a valid claim of feature superiority), is unencumbered by patents, and with a full alpha channel instead of that screwy palette-based transparency crap that .GIFs stuck us with for years (and the .JPG doesn't support at all in any meaningful manner), it is actually a superior standard.
So please, keep on thinking that Flash and .MP3 is the be-all and end-all of standards, that nothing will ever supplant it. As for me, I've seen .OGG files already used extensively behind the scenes in various software so that developers don't have to pay nasty licensing fees, and I can easily imagine that a year or two or five down the road, open standards such as these will be just as prevalent and supported as predominant closed standards are today.
Would aliens be able to comprehend MPEG2? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most media compression schemes exploit how our brain interprets light, motion and sound. Given this, if you played a compressed video to a bird or snake, what would they see? Would their experience of it be anything like ours?
As we switch to digital TV, we will soon be broadcasting MPEG2 streams into space. In a million years, maybe an intelligent alien life form will tune into this MPEG2 stream. Given their brains must have evolved in a different way, would what they see on their screen be interpreted the same way? Likewise, if we intercepted their compressed video stream it would be optimized for how their brain deals with audio and video. Would we be able to view it in a way our brains could properly decode?