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."
Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apart from it not supporting DRM, ogg has only advantages - it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior) and it's open-source w/o patents restrictions...
Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have your answer.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
If they MUST have DRM, I have a great win-win solution for them.
They should encode their increadibly valuable content by moving it to the /dev/null 'encoder'. That way, nobody will ever be able to view even a split second of their content without paying and everyone else can be sure that they won't get ripped off with content that won't actually play properly where and when they want it to.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
=Smidge=
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hint: Have you any idea at all how many video games use Ogg? And can you think of why that might be?
No one used DAT tapes for their media collections...and yet, it was most certainly not a failure. You know, sometimes there's room for more than one technology. There's these things called niches. There are internal, closed systems. Not everything is a consumer end product.
We do not have to discuss Ogg in terms of being an end user accepted format for it to be a viable format. And it has most certainly proven itself and become very entrenched in certain areas.
But hey, you just go on and argue for the sake of arguing mmkay?
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading through the document, it's actually much more reaonable (DRM should be possible, but shouldn't be mandatory) than implied. The OGG thing, however, is very interesting. To me it almost reads like they know someone who has a fundamental patent on OGG. A fundamental patent is one which can't be avoided to implement a standard and thus guarantees control of the standard. However, give that Xiph.org have done a patent search and claim that OGG is patent free and nobody has contradicted them, I can think of at least two more likely things here.
a) the recent Microsoft / Nokia WMA licensing agreements have seriously crippled Nokias freedom to operate with different formats.
b) they are afraid of the fact that whilst OGG is open, control of how the standard evolves is "proprietary". By this they mean not under control of an "open" standardisation body that they can join. Looking at it; Xiph.org seems to have too much industry independence.
Make no mistake, though, the Nokia of five years ago is probably not the Nokia of today. Where old Nokia was trying to deliver devices to let you do whatever you wanted to do, new Nokia is trying to become a media company and that means is almost certainly joining the dark side.
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: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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Time to whip out the STFU gun! (Score:4, Funny)
I don't care. I've never seen a .vorbis file. All I've ever seen is a .ogg file, .ogg files contain music that plays well on my computer, but unlike .mp3-files, not so well on my mp3-player.
Look, if you can't handle that 99% of the world just doesn't care about containers and codecs, but use the file extension to determine media format, you are seriously lacking in social intelligence, and need to be confined to live in solitude for the rest of your life. May I suggest a career in computers?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:5, Insightful)
Ogg is comparable with Apple's QuickTime container format (MOV), Microsoft's former AVI (based on IFF), Microsoft's newer ASF, the rival FOSS Matroska container, or the ISO's MPEG-4 container (MP4, based on QuickTime).
When you talk about Ogg being a "good codec," it demonstrates the kind of impractical, blind bias for free-sounding buzzword projects, which FOSS advocates are quick favor over real open standards that are accepted and established. Ogg isn't open vs closed MPEG-4; they're both open containers available for non-discriminatory licensing. The difference is that there are only some theoretical uses of Ogg and a single source of documentation and libraries for it, while MPEG-4 is in use everywhere, has support across the industry, and has wide hardware support in silicon, because the MPEG-4 container is paired with a portfolio of codecs that people actually use. Ogg also competes with other FOSS containers such as Matroska, so it's not the lone FOSS messiah at all.
Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations).
After realizing there was no reason to fight MPEG-4 with a proprietary runner up, On2 donated Theora to Xiph to use with Ogg, and Xiph published it as an open specification. However, Microsoft basically did the same thing: it published WMV with the SMPTE group as an "open standard" called VC1.
If you think Microsoft's VC1--which it's using to compete against the open MPEG-4--is an "open standard," then you can also say Theora is. It's easier to describe both as failed proprietary technologies that nobody uses, although Microsoft is pushing VC1 hard in HD-DVD and in Windows Vista.
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd. It means that rather than having one set of codecs that the world contributes toward, we'll have an official joke that nobody uses decreed the "standard" while everyone actually uses MPEG-4 / H.264 (and probably H.265 by the time HTML5 arrives).
This is not a case of OpenDocument vs MS-XML, open vs closed. It's closer to a case of GPL v3 vs BSD/Apache: rhetoric vs reality. Trying to rip apart MPEG-4 and install an openly published version of a failed proprietary standard that nobody uses in its place will only hand the lead to Microsoft's VC-1 (which itself is a proprietary version of H.263). What would that accomplish?
Supporters for Ogg/Theora are voting for a Ross Perot, assuring that we'll really get a George Bush. What we really need is an Al Gore: centrist, workable, functional, capable, and proven to work.
If that analogy lost you: pushing Ogg/Theora might make you proud to have voted, but it will only distract from the industry's coalition to unitedly back H.264 from mobile devices to HD. There's far more FOSS support for MPEG-4 and H.264 than for Ogg/Theora and the rest of the outdated codecs Xiph has salvaged from the dumpster of proprietary efforts. Having wide support behind one good, open portfolio of standards will make it easier for FOSS to compete with and participate in the desktop computing world.
Why Low Def is the New HD [roughlydrafted.com]
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War [roughlydrafted.com]
ITU & ISO MPEG-4 codecs and container [roughlydrafted.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, licensing on the other hand becomes more important as the number of people in the network increases and as the speed with which people can access it increases because there's more people who might have had acce
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DVDs are still significantly compressed. And speak for yourself; if I downloaded DVD ISOs on a regular basis I'd fear that my ISP would come after me.
The technical inferiorities of Theora just mean your perfectly good
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?
Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:5, Insightful)
"Non-discriminatory" simply means that the patent holder can't charge Sony a different price per unit than they charge Microsoft. And they'll charge me that same fee, which is of course set based on the assumption that only Sony and Microsoft and companies of their size and revenue model are going to be licensing it. Can you afford $1 every time your movie player is downloaded by someone through APT on Debian/Ubuntu? I can't. That means that I am being discriminated against in terms of access to the codec.
When H.264 can be legally implemented by any "kid in his basement" and distributed to the world without any permission, license fee, or NDA involved, then we can discuss it as an "open web standard". Until then, it is neither open nor free, nor should it be a de jure "standard" for anything. Ogg/Vorbis+Theora, however, can be. Their relative technological merits are not in dispute.
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 b
Yes there is (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The license must be available to all comers. You do not get to choose who gets a license, anyone who pays the fee gets a license.
2) The fee must be fixed. One person can't get a sweetheart deal and another get the shaft.
You meet those criteria, that is a non-discriminatory license, you aren't discriminating.
Take a situation where I own a bar. If I have a night where I sell beer to any customer for $2, that's a non-discriminatory special. Whoever you are, you get to have beer for that price. However if I run a special where only girls in tight shirts get $2 beers, that's a discriminatory special. I am dictating who or what you must be or do to get the pricing.
Trying to redefine things just because you don't like how it works doesn't change how it really is. You aren't being discriminated against just because someone won't give you something for free. You are only being discriminated against if they will give it to someone else for free, but not you.
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:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well thats par for the course here, slashy tends to be more of a fanzine.
I read the Nokia paper, the summary seems to misrepresent it. Some of the points were actually ones that I had made at the W3C AC plenary: Some of the older audio and video formats are comming out of patent soon, it might be nice to know precisely when. I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.
I know that ACC and H.264 offer better compression and in fact I expect them to be used to deliver the bulk of Web content. The trick is how to ensure that the cost of using these technologies is proportional to the value of the bandwidth that they save (a few hundred million dollars) rather than the value of the applications they enable (a few hundred billion dollars).
One of the somewhat frustrating problems here is that useful comparisons of compression quality are pretty hard to come by. One comparison I read disqualified Ogg Theora because it did not compress The Matrix to fit on a CD. In other words a totally arbitrary cut off point. Why choose that movie, who cares about the capacity of a CDROM?
Quite a few MPEG2 patents have expired already, it would take a lot of work to find out when they all expire though. Main question would be what happens with submarine patents at this point.
The reason I prefer this approach is that I just don't think that anyone can invent a new video compression scheme and be sure that it is unencumbered. We thought that GIF was unencumbered when we made it the standard image format for the Web, turned out that we were wrong but there was no way we could have known at the time. I don't like chosing Ogg for the same reason, I would prefer to be absolutely sure we have an unencumbered spec which means choosing something obsolete.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
You probably wouldn't be buying a movie and then streaming it over the net in your browser (or your phone).
Actually, people already are. Netflix had to start doing this because their competitors already did. It's only going to increase, and companies want to slop at the new trough.
Re: (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 fo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And how do you know that to be true?
It would be more correct to say that the creators of the Theora/Vorbis codecs and the Ogg container format hold no patents on it (or in the case of Theora, RF-licensing of On2's patents). It does not however mean that noone else holds a patent. And the way that patents work (i.e, unlike trademarks which must be actively used/protected lest the (TM) holder lose it) a patent holder might choose to keep quiet until the format/codec becomes po
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, a lot of people here are focusing on the fact that ogg doesn't support DRM, but neither does mp3. Seems to be a rather tangential argument.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm happy to accept that Ogg is a better format (in terms of the space/quality tradeoff) than MP3. But I also know that MP3 is almost universally supported and Ogg isn't.
I genuinely had my suspicions that the quote above was a cut-and-paste anti-Ogg troll; it has the air of masquerading as someone who'd tried out the open source choice and been burnt by it... except that- as I mentioned- most potential Ogg users would already have known about these issues. I'm genuinely surprised that you didn't look into this before you decided to rip your music collection.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, 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)
Re:OGG player (Score:4, Interesting)
I have the same stick (from ~2 years ago). With the American firmware, it is not a USB Mass Storage device; you have to use MTP to transfer files (it honors DRM, of course). I re-flashed it with a European firmware from Samsung's international website, and not only is it now a USB Mass Storage device, but it now supports Ogg/Vorbis.
I went looking to see why the US firmware didn't have Ogg/Vorbis support, and it seems that in order to get Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" logo, your device is not allowed to support Ogg/Vorbis. Since that logo program didn't exist for Europe, Samsung left Ogg/Vorbis support in the European version of their firmware.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article was referring to Ogg Theora, not Ogg Vorbis. In fact, the whole article was plainly talking about VIDEO.
Sorry to pick on you, I just had to see if this thread was going to be reined in or not...
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is because, with hindsight, you where doing it wrong.
Just rip all your CD's to FLAC, which is a lossless format. Then just transcode it for whatever device you want, from the "original" FLAC's. Admittedly, what is lacking (at last in Linux) is some easy software to do this, at least as far as I'm aware. (It's much worse on Mac OS X, because iTunes does not support FLAC). Of course, someone might write a trivial script to do the transcoding automatically, but it would be much more convenient if you could just select part of your music library for syncing with other devices, then have the transcoding happen automatically. (sure, it would slow down syncing a bit, but on todays Core 2 Duo's, who cares really..). In other words, it needs a convenient GUI.
Then, before you complain about the amount of space needed for FLAC files as compared to OGG or MP3: the FLAC encoder will compress most albums (even classical music) down to somewhere between 33-50% of their original size. That means about 200-300 MB for the average (1 hour) album. A 500 GB harddisk these days sets you back slightly less than $100. It will fit about 2000 full albums (you do the math).
Now of course I'm not sure how many CD's you own, but certainly if you would own more than 2000 full albums I'm sure you could also afford another $100 harddisk.
If you have less than 500 albums (which I think would be true for about 99,999% of the population) you could even get away with just storing the raw PCM/WAV files, and only encoding them while transferring them to portable devices. The need to compress at least *music* on desktop machines is really a thing of the past now. It's just that most people didn't realize this is the case, yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a reasonable economic conclusion in much of the United States, and that's a serious social problem. Any society where people frequently make a practical decision not to have children is basically doomed.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
To put it plainly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Not having well-off parents to foot the bill for college to give you a unique skill-set is not "something seriously wrong." A good portion of any country lives in poverty, and if you're not a member of a welfare state, when you hit rock bottom you really do need to go work full time just to survive.
Note that most folk who work multiple jobs don't have a single full-time job. They may average 50-60 hours per week among their 2-5 jobs, but since none of their jobs pay benefits and they have higher-than-ordinary travel expenses, they need to work that much just to survive.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Their first what?
The suspense is killing me.
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Executives with 7 figure salaries aren't interested unless it's going to help with DRM. As in most industries the top level of management has almost nothing to do with the actual industry, that is the actual work of making the product. How many music company executives have degrees in Music Theory?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, we all know, the point to this DRM-free music is to simply attack the iTunes Music Store. If they could actually successfully knock iTunes down a lot, then watch and see how fast DRM-free tracks will disappear from Amazon, Microsoft and other online outfits, claiming the big experiment was a failure and piracy must be curbed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well for one thing the PC is not the primary player for most people. iPod's and other "MP3" players are. MP3 is the lingua franca for audio, which makes it much easier to deal in for most. Most people don't make their own files. My previous post was primarily speaking to why ogg hasn't received more support across the industry and user base. Which format to use for encoding your own music or for maximizing your storage space (which isn't a real problem in the days a
Re:Well, isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish Ogg ruled the roost. I do. I wish any open, cross platform format ruled, but it's unlikely to happen.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues [wikipedia.org]
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: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, the "Humpty Dumpty" defense (Score:3, Interesting)
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
"They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
Re:Ah, the "Humpty Dumpty" defense (Score:5, Funny)
(2) have your lawyers claim it as your own
(3) profit!
Unless you're SCO...
From Vorbis.com (Score:4, Insightful)
"Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
I lost any respect for Nokia.
Re:From Vorbis.com (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual quote that's being focused on is:If you look at what the intent of this sentence is likely to have been in the context of the statement as a whole rather than read it literally, it appears that that he's using Ogg as an example of 'a "free" codec or a proprietary technology'.
The reason for opposing Ogg, though, is best summed up by another sentence from the paper:It seems to me that Nokia just wants a standardized way to deliver paid-for video to mobile devices. This kind of service is coming relatively soon and it will involve DRM. And while we like to bitch and moan about how horrible DRM is, the average wireless customer could care less. Nokia just wants the delivery mechanism to be somewhat standardized so that they don't have to have separate implementations for each wireless carrier.
Agreed (Score:3, Informative)
And here I was all ready with a joke about Mitt Romney calling secularism a "religion" last week!
what a tool ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ogg technologies, based almost exclusively on the current perception of them being
free.
proprietary. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple and Ogg (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it isn't. But I hope you weren't under the impression that Apple is actually against DRM in principle. They're only against DRM some of the time, only when it makes them money, and only because they're one of the few companies that have woken up to the fact that they can make more money by doing away with DRM some of the time.
And that's why Apple opposes Vorbis -- because they're actually on the ball, because they've got the foresight to realise both the pros and the cons of open formats for them, and they know exactly what the consequences would be if open standards were to become dominant.
Re:Apple and Ogg (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're following a red herring here. Apple is opposed to DRM, from pure selfishness, but that applies as much to Vvideo as it does to audio. Apple implements DRM when they have to and removes it when they can, this is because their goal is to sell hardware. To sell hardware, you need content. If they can only get content with DRM, they'll try to use minimal DRM under their control because their goal is to make things as easy for users as possible, because then more people buy their hardware. If they can do away with it, well that is even easier for users and will sell even more hardware.
No, Apple's opposition to Vorbis as a standard has little to do with DRM, as they could always apply DRM encapsulation for it. Actually I suspect Apple is just heavily invested in the MPEG standard, which is not as open, but is DRM agnostic as well. Having developed a lot of technologies on top of the MPEG standard as well as both pro and consumer tools for creating it, Apple just sees no benefit to them for Vorbis, since licensing costs are not all that significant.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If all Apple was interested in was having content available for its hardware, then they wouldn't have had any objection to Real's Harmony downloads.
Did you even read my previous post? I wrote that if there was DRM, Apple wanted to control it. Real was trying to enforce DRM, using Apple's own authentication servers without permission, via an exploit in the system. No company in their right mind would tolerate that. It is one thing to allow content from another supplier, another is to tolerate a security hole and pay the bandwidth costs for another company to authenticate their DRM.
Steve Jobs came out against DRM only after Apple was approached through channels by EMI about non-DRM sales.
That is actually not true. Jobs spoke out against DRM, calling it do
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If that is all true, then why is the largest part of the itms still drm'ed? If the goal of Apple is to make it easy for the users, they'd have removed it eons ago.
Look, Apple needs the content from the music publishers. They are pushing to remove as much as possible, but they're rather have DRM'd content than no content at all. Apple cn only release music without DRM when the publishers agree and they have only so much influence.
No, the only goal that Apple has; is to make as much money as it can, and it doesn't care about DRM or open formats. It's all about the bottom line and the shareholders.
What is wrong with people's reading comprehension today? As I said Apple wants to get rid of DRM because it makes them more money in the long term. That's the whole point. Apple makes more money without DRM, thus the argument that Apple
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
ACC/H2.64 (Score:3, Interesting)
Personnally I'd rather see divx and mp3 be used as the next standards, but Xvid and Ogg would be cool.
Re:ACC/H2.64 (Score:5, Interesting)
I think why Apple picked them up is that they are about the best codecs out there (I'm not going to entertain a debate between AAC and OGG quality, please, the reasoning here is that H.264 and AAC are DESIGNED to work together). Also AAC is very good at surround sound, something MP3 has never been popular for, perhaps for the reasons below.
The reason that the community and market have been slow to accept them are that they are more complicated, thus heavier and/or more expensive to implement, as well as the fact that Xvid and Divx (same thing, different encoders - another part of MPEG-4 by the way) can (or used to) produce smaller filesizes for video, and at standard def you wouldn't really know the difference. But as HD content has become more popular, it's become more common to find media in H.264 with AAC 5.1 audio, and as en- and decoders get better (not to mention computers) H.264 and AAC present less of a relative strain on both disk (or bandwidth) and processor, and at HD resolution the hit to speed is completely worth it.
I think this might be way Nokia is pushing H.264 and AAC - they present real possibility for advancement into high-def streaming content, something that other codecs really don't. Please note that I really haven't had any experience with Ogg Theora (which is NOT the same as Ogg Vorbis) in high-def environments, so I can't really say for sure. Also I'm not sure how it is at streaming.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Reaaallly? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if this has anything to do with him not particularly liking ogg?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
His name is Wenger, and you're probably right. If I had this guy's level of experience in digital multimedia and was as actively involved as he is in implementing such widely-used, RAND-licensed formats as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc. (which is what UB Video provided, [compression-links.info] before it was bought by Scientific Atlanta, [scientificatlanta.com] itself now a subsidiary of Cisco), then I might have reason to not particularly like OGG, Vorbis, Theora, etc., either. Or, fo
Nokia: You Just Don't Get It (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a scan through the PDF document, and couldn't really believe what I was reading. They're yet another company being pussy-whipped by Hollywood and the whole DRM issue (and it has now been demonstrably proven that widespread DRM can never work), rather than looking at the realities of the technology and working out how to make money from it. This is a very bizarre section to read: Commercial Constraints of the Web and Video ecosystems: Nokia doesn't seem to understand that the W3C is not in the habit of recommending technologies as web standards that are patented and proprietary and that mean that implementation is restricted.
Digital video over the web has been severely hindered, because it is not as widespread as content available through HTML.
No other W3C standard takes into account DRM. Nokia seems to misunderstand the role of the W3C.
Non-professional sources?
I think that should confirm that this document is junk, and that Nokia doesn't have the faintest idea what it is talking about.
This is just downright bizarre.
At first, I wasn't not so sure that Nokia was concerned about keeping Hollywood happy, as they are about keeping the current status quo of proprietary video and audio codecs, additionally restricted by patents if required. However, I haven't got the foggiest what Nokia are arguing. They just seem to be squirming over Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora for some reason.
Re:Nokia: You Just Don't Get It (Score:5, Funny)
Nokia not at ease with Ogg (Score:5, Insightful)
The post focuses on a single detail: the author calls Ogg a "proprietary format". This is of course a regrettable and stupid comment as Ogg, Theora and Vorbis are not proprietary in any sense. But I suggest reading the whole paper which is an interesting and valid point of view. They are AGAINST the decision of the W3C to recommend those format for Web video. They use three arguments:
1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks.
The last one is partially valid also but I have to add a comment: First, Nokia has vested interest in codec developments itself (they have patents related to the AMR codec). Second one has to remind that they are phone manufacturers. It is clear that they are more at ease with the standard process developed by the ITU. And I understand them: they are not building software but they are embedding chips with hardware codec capabilities. If someone 'forks' the standard and the OSS community decides to create an alternative standard (see Torrent protocol), all the chips that they developped are toasted.
Emmanuel
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."
Poorly Written (Score:4, Interesting)
For a position paper issued by a major company, that was awfully rough. I found several spelling mistakes ("anoher" for "another") for example. Apparently Nokia can't be bothered to run a spell checker on documents like this one. And call me crazy, but usually you don't use smiley faces like :-) in a position paper (as he does on page four). Then we have sentences like this one, which is the bit about Ogg being proprietary:
Holy comma splice, Batman! And isn't it redundant to talk about a "W3C-lead standardization ... by W3C"? But te worst thing here is the totally unclear use of "proprietary." At other places in the document, the author recommends selecting "older media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that related
patents are expired (or are close to expiration)." Which seems odd. Isn't the whole attraction of Ogg Theora that it isn't patented at all? Why recommend an older standard that IS patented over a newer one that isn't? And how exactly does that come under the label "proprietary" anyway?
As a position paper, then, it could be better. It does in fact give their position. But it does so in a way which is unclear, and its author doesn't seem to think that writing a position paper is different from writing a comment on a web forum.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
My guess at their reasoning:
They are right though (Score:4, Interesting)
The company, On2 Technologies, has disclaimed all patent right on the technology. However, as far as I know they are not a significant holder of video compression patents. I don't think any actual big video patent holders has commented about Theora. This means that there is a significant risk of submarine patents.
According to the paper Theora is comparable in performance to the old H.261 codec. H.261 is about 20 years old so all patents on it have most likely expired. H.261 is widely implemented and if the performance claims are true, it makes Theora rather pointless.
Re:They are right though (Score:4, Insightful)
Theora may be the product of a company, but that is not enough to make it proprietary; the question is whether the company maintains control over it as its own property. As it stands, while the company could change or supersede the current standard and people would probably follow along to the extent that the changes are reasonable, this is not owing to any special "intellectual property" rights they have, but only their social position. Moreover, if Theora was adopted as the standard, it would then be standardized by a recognized standards organization. By your logic here, the C language would have been proprietary before its standardization, yet its status at that point was the polar opposite of what is normally called proprietary (e.g., the .doc format). This is a severe abuse of language.
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: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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (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 i
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing the entire point here, but why the heck does the next version of html 5 even need to define a standard format for video?
HTML5 is a very practical attempt to define additional elements and set a standard for all the things Web developers do today, but in a wide variety of ways that leads to incompatibility problems or just really complex code. I like it because when I built some XHTML for uses I needed I came up with many of the same basic tags, even using the same, fairly logical names as what they did.
I don't think anyone would argue that one common thing Web pages do today is provide streaming videos. I don't think any