Open codecs - why haven't they taken off?

BrionS · Last edited by BrionS on Tue Aug 05, 2025 10:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

This thread was spawned by another about web browsers potentially supporting audio and video playback natively instead of requiring a plug-in. Essentially the article linked in that thread stated that the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora (audio and video codecs respectively) were originally slated to be the default format supported natively by HTML 5.0, but were pulled from the spec at the last minute.

This enraged several developers and got me thinking: If Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora are so great, why haven't they been adopted by the industry already? Ogg Vorbis at least has been around for several years and yet MP3, WMA, and AAC are still the prevalent formats.

If Ogg needs to be written into the HTML 5.0 specification just to get noticed, doesn't that say something about the codecs themselves, that perhaps they're not really accepted by the Internet as a whole and that forcing them to be the default is merely the political agenda of some group of open source developers?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have open source codecs like Ogg be accepted but should its acceptance be through its own merits or simply by taking a Microsoft tack and shoving it everyone's faces (ala I.E.)? Firefox took off on its own merits without such tactics, so what makes Ogg so great an under-appreciated that it should become the standard browser audio and video codec?

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mushroom · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2025 2:12 pm Post subject:

The answer to that question is quite simple .... this all political

Open standard formats eliminate vendor lock-in Exclamation

With out some form of vendor lock-in, propitiatory software makers would have to compete on pure merit.

Despite the fact that Ogg Vorbis is used in several X-Box games, it seems that M$ would rather pay for propitiatory formats, than support an open/free one and lose any degree of vendor lock-in they may have.

I do not think that Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora support DRM, so there is another group to fight against it.

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Ephemeral · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2025 9:57 pm Post subject:

Ogg is great.. so is FLAC.. i was using these for a while a couple of years ago...

Now storage is much cheaper both at high bit rate seem viable...

However the problem that surfaced for me was .. i wanted to have he music collection in just one format... and i wanted that format to play on any device or computer

So i went back to MP3 320

Ive got some fairly serious audio gear connected to the computer... ESI Juli@ connected to Audiolab amplifier and Monitor Audio Bookshelf speakers... So maybe i should give FLAC another go... Ive not used my IPOD in a while and besides i think u can now make it play these formats with Rockbox? or something....

Only thing is.. id have to rip everything Laughing

jbsnake · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2025 12:39 am Post subject:

i rip everything in flac... then encode to either ogg or mp3 when i need to populate a device Smile

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VHockey86 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2025 2:29 pm Post subject:

Mp3 works fine for me and its "open" enough that I can play it with just about any music software out there. Handheld music players are a different story but I don't use those...

To me it just seems like a classical barrier to entry problem. People aren't going to want to use the format unless its supported by whatever applications and players they use. Mp3 is used by both and is a bit of a de-facto standard because it was the first mainstream digital audio format. Applications and players aren't going to make the effort to support it if no one is using it. Two of the most popular formats - WMA with WMP and AAC with iTunes I imagine dictate what the majority of users use. Most people probably don't even rip their own music - they just download it from other sources, and I rarely see scene released music that isn't in high VBR Mp3 format - unless you are explicitly looking for FLAC versions, but that's more difficult to find.

I don't really think it has anything to do with whether or not OGM/OGG is a good format...but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that these vendors would want to keep using their own formats. They have been using the formats for quite awhile and have a lot of time and effort invested into them. If Apple were to all of a sudden start using a new audio format on their iPods that would mean a significant rework to their hardware and firmware, not to mention all the transitional issues with an established user-base working off an old format.

In the computer/electronics industry where things change rapidly and there are always improvements, but just because a new format comes along, even if its better, that doesn't mean its worthwhile to adopt that format.

I realize that these formats ARE supported by quite a few players by default, and many more via codecs/plugins, but my guess is that your average computer user has never heard of them. However I'd wager that if you walked down the street and starting asking people, just about everyone has heard of mp3s, and most would know what it is.

Is OGG/OGG really a better format anyways? I've heard it gives better compression and audio quality with the same bitrate than MP3, but isn't AAC quite advanced too? Either way I've never really noticed any difference among high bitrate files. I typically just listen to 256 or 320kbps mp3, but I'm not a big audiophile (and neither are most people). Some of my friends player music on laptop speakers and think it sounds fine...I think they're crazy but whatever Smile

Ephemeral · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2025 3:22 pm Post subject:

One of the fundamental things about Ogg vs MP3 vs format Z is the physcho acoustic scheme being deployed... I believe they are different

(As in what frequencies are being filtered and how the human perception is dealt with to deliver the compression that such lossy formats give you...)

So i think it might be possible with some high end gear to notice the difference in the reproduction of the frequencies

I think i read awhile back Ogg dealt with the higher frequencies better than LAME (MP3) and LAME dealt with middle ones better than Ogg... but i dont have the link to hand

coastie · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2025 4:42 pm Post subject:

Until we can get hardware manufacturers to support an open standard we will always have this problem. I bought an iriver specifically b/c i can play ogg files on it. Very Happy

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