Ogg Vorbis RC3 is out

Ogg Vorbis RC3 is out.

Here's a quote from their website:

It took a little longer than planned, but I think everyone will agree that this was a release worth waiting for. Quality wise this is quite a bit better than RC2. This release features bitrate management, meaning that instead of choosing one of several VBR modes, you can specify average bitrate, put boundaries on the bitrates to emulate CBR (useful for streaming), or the default VBR modes which have millions of possible quality levels. We still recommend VBR unless you have a reason to use managed bitrates.

Also, please consider supporting our efforts for RC4 and 1.0 by donating money to [email protected] via PayPal.


So, now that RC3 is out, can anyone give us an update on the possibility of ogg support?

IIRC there is no FPU on the ARM in the empeg. Therefore, OGG would have to have a decoder specially coded for use with the empeg.. I believe this is the current holdup.


Tom

Yeah, doesn't Ogg require licensing fees, too? I could be wrong about that.

In any case, at the current time no one uses Ogg. It's a question of demand. I think the quickest way to get Ogg onto the player would be to somehow get Mike, Hugo, or Rob hooked on the format.

Yeah, doesn't Ogg require licensing fees, too? I could be wrong about that.

I would hope not, considering Ogg Vorbis is the open source communities answer to MP3 and the other formats, including video down the road.

Various people, including Thompson (who hold the MP3 patents) claim(ed?) that Ogg infringed on various patents they own.

There is an integer Ogg decoder for the ARM, but it is not open source; the people who implemented it have a special licence from Xiph so they don't have to give their code back to the open-source tree. This suprised me too, but the people at Xiph would probably like to eat!

Hugo

Yeah, doesn't Ogg require licensing fees, too? I could be wrong about that.

According to the FAQ ogg is "completely free, open, and unpatented" ;)

In any case, at the current time no one uses Ogg. It's a question of demand. I think the quickest way to get Ogg onto the player would be to somehow get Mike, Hugo, or Rob hooked on the format

True true.

From the expeiriments that I performed, ogg seemed to be capable of just as high a quality as MP3, but at slightly smaller sizes, and now RC3 is supposed to be even better. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but I for one have had to erase files from my empeg to make room for more several times, so I am constantly looking for better alternitives. I am also extremely anal about quality, so lower bitrates and such are absolutely not an option for me.

So, I guess my point is, the only reason I'm not using ogg, is because I can't. If the empeg supported it, I'd use it.

Has anyone else checked out any of the new sample ogg files on vorbis.com? The newer files are only 60-70kbps, and they actually sound pretty good. MUCH better than similarly encoded mp3s.

At first I thought it was strange that they would use such low bitrates for sample files, but now that I've listened to several of them, I'm blown away with the quality they can get out of such small files. Amazing.

If anyone is remotely curious about ogg, I highly recommend downloading some of the new sample files and checking them out. You will not believe how good they sound for the size of the file.

I am not likely to go back through my collection and re-rip everything to .ogg, but if we can have it on the empeg then I will certainly use .ogg for future encoding. Any way to fit more tracks into the available space without losing quality has got to be a good idea.

Frog51
Scooby Sport

If some other team writes an integer ogg codec can we have it in the empeg? Please Hugo:)

A related thread from the hydrogenaudio website:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=6467#post6467

Apparently (according to the thread) Iriver will support Ogg in the near future.

"iMP-350 SlimX"

heh heh... Funny name. Cool little player, though. Never heard of it before... Hmmm...

Looks like a good step for ogg, the more devices that support it the better!

Does anyone know if this little player uses an ARM chip?

Yes, I believe it uses the 7312 from cirrus.

Hugo

In reply to:

---

In any case, at the current time no one uses Ogg. It's a question of demand.

---

Maybe no one uses it becasue certain harwares dont support it I'd love to use it. I can't wait to encode my new CD's to this format. So count me as one who *demands* .ogg support.

Forget the lack of support for it on the hardware. How about the lack of support in application software?

I really haven't seen any compelling reasons to get Hugo et al. to consider adding Vorbis to the empeg. If someone provided them with FREE source code for decoding, using only integer instructions, then I'm sure they might consider adding it. But for them to dedicate any development time to work on it would be foolish. There's little or no gain at this point.

Unless some catastrophic events happen, I don't see Vorbis touching the popularity of MP3 or WMA. It looks (so far) destined to be a very fringe encoder. If things change, maybe THEN will be a better time for these requests.

Anyway, better than asking the empeg team for Vorbis support, would be to request that anyone write a quality integer-based decoder that will work with the ARM.

Bruno