Flutterby™! : OGG or Not to OGG 2002-09-05 16:45:34+00

OGG or Not to OGG

2002-09-05 16:45:34+00 by TC 11 comments

I was suprised by the Slashdot poll showing 76% of their readers use only MP3s to the exclusion of Ogg Vorbis. Ogg devices are right around the corner but MP3 devices will always be more widely spread. So I ask Flutterby readers "Why switch to Ogg"

One major reason for switching to Ogg Vorbis is the standard offers better quality audio at the same bitrate. This is about on par with the latest Windows Media Audio and MP3PRO formats -- but both formats are proprietary, and neither is very widespread, either.

In combination with the fact that Thomson could change the requirements on MP3's licensing at any time, I am also planning to switch to Ogg in the future.

Yep. My reasons are audio quality and licensing, the latter mainly because Thompson has tried to suppress MP3 encoders better than their own. Heck, I guess that's probably both.

I'm not sure why. I've heard Ogg has better sound and about Thompson's change(?) to MP3 licensing. But I don't really understand the latter - licensing for who? Encoders? Users? Distributors? I've never paid any attention to MP3 licenses and I'm unsure why I should now.

I did grab the Ogg encoder (I think) as a prelude to trying it out. But I'm not real clear on how to use it. It looks like the only interface is drag-and-drop. Yuck.

Oh, yeah. The other thing keeping me from going wholly Ogg is that all my files are MP3 already and I'm not doing much encoding these days. Maybe after the move and I get settled in to school and living at the in-laws I'll get back to ripping our CD collection. Hmmm... are Ogg files smaller?

Same reason I don't use gif images. I don't want someone sending me a nasty gram about something I put on the web. (I've already gotten one about some GPLed stuff -- stuff I didn't modify, btw).

I guess I am getting older and more resistant to the ADD style of picking a format of the month. I think the GIF/PNG analogy is pretty good. I use both but if using gif was a problem, I'd drop it like a martha stewart stock. I'd like to see Ogg supported in more devices before switching. I may switch over but not today.

There's no guarantee that ogg does not infringe anybody's patents, only Christopher Montgomery's earnest protestations, which, last I checked, have no particular legal standing. He doesn't go into much detail, but as far as I can tell, he's looked at some of Fraunhofer's MP3-related patents and done something that he thinks doesn't infringe them. But there's lots of other digital audio compression patents out there, and even enumerating them, let alone evaluating what they cover,would be an expensive & time-consuming enterprise.

td, for that matter there's no guarantees that Thompson owns MP3, they've just got the most money to pay the lawyers right now. Hmmm... given that I can get an MP3 player right now, maybe it's time to go see if I can find that .deb LAME package and just rip to MP3s.

LAME doesn't seem to be in the Debian archives. You can grab the sources and do a dpkg-buildpackage though -- there's the relevant debian specific information in the source.

Debian doesn't package LAME (or any other MP3 encoders) because of the patent concerns. (And it's an EU patent, so even the normal Debian "hack" of 'non-US' doesn't work.) It's not too hard to Google up some packages, however -- and if all else fails, I've got 'em and can get them to people.