Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary" 619
a nona maus writes "Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to."
Re:Anoter one going for a Waterloo (Score:5, Informative)
Proprietary would imply that independent implementations cannot be made or cannot be made easily without violating patents or reverse engineering or whatever. Vorbis and Theora are nothing of the sort -- they are fully open and unencumbered.
For very large values of "now" (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:To the tagger: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:4, Informative)
What I really suspect Nokia is saying in this paper are in criteria #2 and #5: "There is only a manageable risk in implementing the specification. In practice, we prefer specifications that have been developed in a collaborative manner under an IPR policy with disclsore requirements. Examples include specifications developed by the ITU-T, ISO/IEC, or the IETF." and "Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."
Basically, "we think Ogg will get us sued" and "Hollywood won't use Ogg". It's a shame that Stephan Wenger (the author of this paper) has now damaged his own credibility by writing a four-page exercise in being disingenuous.
I'd like to point out that the one really successful proprietary codec, MP3, is a success because of the huge numbers of people who intially implemented the codec without a license and because it didn't support DRM, thus leading to widespread piracy, and establishing the format as the de facto standard for unencumbered audio. I would personally consider the W3C negligent if they did not choose an open (free as in beer and speech) codec.
Nokia article summary (Score:4, Informative)
- No-one knows if Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora are encumbered by patents. They were developed to be free of the main known patents, but they could still be encumbered by some submarine patent. If they're accepted as the baseline, Nokia face unknown risk if such a patent emerges after they've deployed the technology in hundreds of millions of phones. With H.261/AAC, the risks are more known because an unknown patent-holder would have sued someone by now.
- There's a lot of content available online (though not directly as part of Web standards). Nokia in concerned that the content producers will will stear clear of Ogg in favour of solutions that support DRM or at least have a known track record. Better the devil you know...
The second concern is probably rubbish, in so far as they are asking for H.264/AAC instead. DRM on these is completely orthogonal to the issue of the codec - you could easily wrap Theora in a DRM wrapper if you wanted (though why you'd want to is beyond me).The first concern though is more interesting. Basically Nokia seems to be saying that they'd rather pay predictable patent licensing fees for H.264/AAC than face unknown risk. That's a business decision, and I don't know of any good argument against it - we really don't know if there are any submarine patents that Theora or Vorbis might infringe on. From what I know about coding, it seems unlikely (especially in the case of Vorbis), but not impossible to me.
Despite this, I think W3C made the right call and should stick to it.
Re:ACC/H2.64 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?
Ogg isn't a codec. It's a container format. Vorbis is the audio codec in question, and Theora is the video codec in question.
Theora was created using proprietary code and patented techniques developed by On2 and used in their VP3 codec, adapted to fit inside an Ogg container. There are tools to let you convert existing VP3 streams into Ogg streams.
The Xiph.org foundation negotiated free access for all to those patented technology before adapting and adopting it. From the Theora FAQ [theora.org]:
Yes, some portions of the VP3 codec are covered by patents. However, the Xiph.org Foundation has negotiated an irrevocable free license to the VP3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public. It is legal to use VP3 in any way you see fit (unless, of course, you're doing something illegal with it in your particular jurisdiction). You are free to download VP3, use it free of charge, implement it in a for-sale product, implement it in a free product, make changes to the source and distribute those changes, or print the source code out and wallpaper your spare room with it.
The paper from Nokia seems to revolve around the fact that it doesn't support DRM from what I can see.
Re:Nokia not at ease with Ogg (Score:4, Informative)
Monty (the inventor of Vorbis) can comment on it: http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html [mit.edu]
"Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies."
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Vorbis is pretty much dead. While its quality is good, Vorbis has quite high performance requirements just for decoding (negligible on current desktop PCs, but not on portables that run on battery). Even Vorbis's developer Xiph.org acknowledged that and instead of trying to "fix" Vorbis, they started development of an entirely new audio codec called Ghost.
While Vorbis and Theora are in no way proprietary, the industry already decided to support MPEG-4. Even Microsoft supports it out of the box on Xbox 360 and Zune. Vorbis was cool when it was released, but it never had a modern video codec as companion.
Re:Reasoning (Score:3, Informative)
Fact check: Youtube accepts video in almost any codec and (as they have mentioned (it was in respect to their coming higher definition video) in the past) stores an unaltered copy, then they essentially transcode everything to H264 and wrap it in FLV. Google would likely be fine with converting it to whatever, as they have already shown with the iphone, which doesn't use FLV (but does use H264).
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:2, Informative)
You have to remember that Ogg/Vorbis isn't truly patent free: one or two companies have granted RF licenses to any and all patents covering Ogg/Vorbis, but that's far from every company/organisation/person with patents, and several major companies have stated they are aware of patents that cover Ogg/Vorbis that are not covered by the RF grants.
Obligatory Link (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.vorbis.com/faq/#fan [vorbis.com]
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nokia article summary (Score:3, Informative)
My guess at their reasoning:
- H.264 and AAC were developed in standards organizations where members need to declare what patents they have that a new standard might infringe. So there should be no submarine patents from the main industry players.
- H.264 and AAC have been around long enough and are deployed widely enough (think iPods and HD-TV) that any patent bandit would have sued them already.
Whereas in comparison, there hasn't been anyone worth suing over Ogg Vorbis or Theora.Such is the screwed up state of the world of software patents :-(
Re:Whats this got to do with HTML5? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
OGG player (Score:5, Informative)
Almost the whole range of Samsung has OGG/Vorbis support built-in.
Also, there are a lot of "NoName" asian, or less known brands (most of the time re-packaged asian "nonames") that support Swiss Bull-It [swissbull-it.com] is such re-packager, most of their player support OGG/Vorbis out of the box, some other after a firmware upgrade.
I know there are even OGG/Vorbis supporting devices in the "USB stick" form factor (my brother has one).
In fact, appart the few "Big Brands" who usually support only MP3 (because it's such a huge standard that they can't avoid it) and WMA/ATRAC/AAC+DRM or whatever is the proprietary format of their associated shop ; most lesser brands will support OGG because there's no technical limitation preventing it, there's no patent to prevent them, and that enables them to add another bullet point to their list, with very minimal efforts (There's already an open-source integer-math only implementation called Tremor - adding OGG support for a player usually just means recompiling tremor for whatever version of ARM serves as the player's CPU).
Sasmung is more an exception for being both a known brand and providing OGG support.
As a matter of fact, I've always encouraged people to keep a copy of their library in a loss-less format too.
This way, there's no quality loss in case of quality loss, in the event of having to shift formats, or use a newer version of the usual codec with better compression.
Depends on what format the people chosed to save their library into.
I've already had friends with their libraries of WMA changed into coaster because they reinstalled windows, or changed some hardware which triggered windows thinking that it is on a different PC.
On the other hand, all you need to play OGGs is just to choose your player wisely. Either stick only 1 brand (Samsung ), or if you want to go for the cheap, accept having a player with an obscure name that nobody has ever heard about (and which will have changed business before next year)
Fascinating position... (Score:3, Informative)
The three suggestions they give are interesting. The first is to stay out of it, making interoperability difficult, as they said, but they effectively dismiss it because look how great Flash is without being a standard (that's a good argument to actually dictate something as far as I'm concerned). The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard, as it would mean delivering poorer quality content or being incredibly costly bandwidth wise. All it takes is one or two sites to deviate, but provide a richer standard to make standards compliance mean absolutely nothing. The final suggestion they are confident would lead to H264 and AAC, and they certainly wouldn't mind that.
Re:What's so great about Ogg? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed (Score:3, Informative)
And here I was all ready with a joke about Mitt Romney calling secularism a "religion" last week!
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
DRM for OGG (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues [wikipedia.org]
Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing the point here: Vorbis + Theora is the only major non-patent-encumbered (and therefore legal to use commercially or in free software without paying a bunch of lawyers to figure out what patent fees you owe who) option for video.
MPEG-4 and similar are great for pirates and organizations big enough to have patent lawyers on staff - but standards have to do better than that. Small companies and free software projects have to be able to play too.
Re:proprietary. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, it's covered by Sun patents. The patent license Sun has granted for those patents only applies to 1.0 of the standard, and future version that Sun participates in. That means that if Sun doesn't like the way the standard is going, they can drop out and kill it. The license does NOT cover forked formats, so you couldn't come up with your own document format based on ODT.
That sure sounds proprietary. Open and proprietary are not opposites.
Re:Ogg is an audio codec (Score:5, Informative)
Ogg is like Quicktime or ASF. There's nothing technically stopping anybody from delivering a mp3 inside an Ogg (seriously), Quicktime, or ASF container. Here's proof:
Putting a
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:5, Informative)
According to a news release [mpegla.com] from 2002 which is hosted on the MPEG LA site, the price for mp4 was:
2. In the case of Internet (wired and wireless) or mobile, annual royalties with annual limitations and thresholds will apply: (a) for the manufacture and sale of decoders and/or encoders: US $0.25 per activated decoder and/or encoder subject to an annual cap per legal entity of $1,000,000 for decoders and $1,000,000 for encoders (to be paid by the manufacturer that offers functioning product for sale or distribution, either directly or through a chain of distribution, to the end user), but there is no royalty for the first 50,000 decoders and first 50,000 encoders in a calendar year sold or distributed by a legal entity (applies to no more than one legal entity in an affiliated group); (b) for the use of decoders and encoders to decode or encode MPEG-4 video (to be paid by the party that is the apparent source of such video to the consumer), a licensee may choose to pay US $0.25 per subscriber per year or US $0.000333 per minute of MPEG-4 video used, each subject to an annual cap of $1,000,000 per legal entity, or a $1,000,000 annual paid-up fee (with no royalty reporting obligation), but no royalty is payable on the first 50,000 subscribers during a calendar year (applies to no more than one legal entity in an affiliated group). Subscriber refers to each unique viewer for any part of a year, but where the content provider's remuneration is not directly from subscriptions (e.g., advertiser-supported services), MPEG LA will work directly with Licensees to come up with a consistent method of counting subscribers that works with their business models.
3. In the case of Stored Video (packaged media and video transmitted and stored for viewing for which a transactional fee is paid), the replicator or content provider will pay (a) US $0.01 per 30 minutes or part to a maximum of US $0.04 per movie; (b) US $0.005 per 30 minutes or part thereof to a maximum of US $0.02 per movie where the content of the Stored Video is 5 years or older (after it was copyrighted or subject to be copyrighted), and (c) US $0.002 for a Stored Video of 12 minutes or less.
So, if the current terms even vaguely approach this older release, the difference in price/time sacrifice for the higher file size is more than offset by the pricing. Dollars and cents, free and open makes sense.
Anyone got current/more accurate pricing info?
AAC, then? (Score:3, Informative)
No, people don't love mp3 because of iTunes, it's the other way around -- iTunes would not exist, were it not for mp3. People don't particularly love mp3, either, they just assume it's the only option out there -- kind of like Windows on PCs.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
I've done this on multiple tracks on multiple machines with good earphones, vorbis is always the least annoying for passages with encoder defects. However i do have an 3gen nano so vorbis isn't a real option, nor is alternative firmware.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Informative)
- Improved sound quality
- Better tag support
- Better streaming support
- Chained stream support
- Metadata multiplexing
- Support for more than 2 channels
etc.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:1, Informative)
Seems pretty trivial to me.
Now if only HAL realised that my Cowon iAudio U2 supports ogg... (much of my library is in ogg, and it is transcoded to mp3 by Rhythmbox)
A.C.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, there IS such a thing... (Score:3, Informative)
Non-discriminatory licensing is where anyone that pays the up-front and ongoing royalty price gets to license it.
If I license it for FREE, then that's the price.
If I license it for a fifty cents per instance using the hypothetical patent then that's the price.
Anyone stepping up to the plate gets to license.
RAND (Reasonable And...) means that it has to be some realistic thing per unit- say zero to something proportionate to it's liability to be used, for example the MP3 patents are licensed out in a reasonable fashion (Reasonable being if you're implementing DVD players or portable music players...). Unreasonable would be something like $500 per instance for something like that.
Re:OGG player (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
It can never be like GIF.
I dont see what Nokia is talking about however.
W3C is making a tag for html (or similar) and they need a open format which everyone can use.
Why any DRM is required is puzzling because a) everyone has to be able to view it and b) its video over the net.
You probably wouldn't be buying a movie and then streaming it over the net in your browser (or your phone).
Infact Nokia's own selection criteria is contradictory since you can never have a completely open DRM system.
It requires security by obscruity otherwise everyone can bypass it easily.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes Ogg is completely patent-free. Thats the entire point of it.
The reference implementation (libogg) is BSD licenced and the specs are public domain.
The FSF is also behind it. Even RMS likes it.
Vorbis is currently used in quite a few high profile games such as Doom 3, UT 2004 and GTA.
Its far superior to MP3, ACC and WMA at low bit rates and is on par or better at higher bit rates.
Theora is patented but its license is royalty free for anyone to use for any purpose.
On2 (the creators) have disclaimed all rights to it.
If you want a free as in beer and freedom audio and/or video codec then Ogg is a perfect candidate.
You cant really argue against that.
Re:Nokia not at ease with Ogg (Score:1, Informative)
The draft HTML5 standard doesn't say you can't implement *more* than Theora, but it does say that you should (not even MUST, thanks Apple
Vorbis cpu requirements (Score:3, Informative)
IMHO there are just a few problems with Vorbis, cpu load is not one of them:
a) It is not at all suitable for contineous streaming, with multiple receivers connecting/disconnecting on the fly, since you have to start by decoding the 4-8 KB header before you can make any sense of the sound frames.
b) To get decent decoding performance, you have to unpack & cache all the codebook information in the header packets, this requires from about 50 to 300 KB, which can be significant in a small device.
c) Even though Vorbis is in theory independent of the Ogg container format, most existing source code expects to find Ogg frames surrounding all Vorbis packets. This is an implementation and not a specification problem.
d) Vorbis really prefers to have fast fp support available, but Theora is an open-source fixed-point implementation which has been used as the starting point for quite low-resource embedded implementations.
Terje
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Informative)
At high bitrates, no. At lower bitrates (such as 64 kbps for streaming to mobile devices with EDGE service only), Vorbis blows away MP3.
Wrong (Score:1, Informative)
There is a $1/unit hardware vorbis decoder chip out there which draws less than 50mw. All the modern software based players have CPUs which are easily fast enough for Vorbis, without any loss of battery life.
The issues here are not technical. They are political. If you ship free formats in your device you pay 10x the licensing fees for MP3 and AAC. It's good old fashion monopoly extension tactics for the win.
The W3C HTML5 proposed standard allows any codec to be included, but Ogg/Theora+Vorbis is recommended as a baseline. Other than another 100k of flash storage, including that as an option along side whatever H.264 DRM++ codec would be harmless to Nokia, but the additional fees they would need to pay for H.264/AAC licensing because they included free formats would make that decision quite uneconomical indeed.