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Music Media

Ogg Now An RFC 276

Logic writes "The Ogg bitstream format (used by Ogg Vorbis) has been enshrined in RFC 3533, "The Ogg Encapsulation Format Version 0", for all you folks who won't look at something unless it has an RFC attached to it."
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Ogg Now An RFC

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  • by sulli ( 195030 ) * on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:21PM (#5976353) Journal
    RFC 3533 over RFC 1149! (perfect for those multi-year John Cage tunes)
    • Re:Can't wait for (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Anybody considering this should note that RFC1149 has been superceded by RFC2549, countering data loss to hawks and the like.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I turn my nose up at any psychoaustic scheme, especially now I have the remixed 7.1 surround Super-Audio CD version of 4'33... blows your mind, you can hear a pin drop! Especially with my new $20k speakers.
    • RFC 3533 over RFC 1149! (perfect for those multi-year John Cage tunes)

      Screw that...it needs RFC3514 [ietf.org] support so that Britney/NSuck/etc. OGGs can be marked appropriately. With RFC3514 support in routers and such, maybe you'd see much less of that crap clogging the Internet.

  • Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Surye ( 580125 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (08eyrus)> on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:22PM (#5976358) Homepage
    We can now get some more external player support. Especially in all the CD/MP3 players with upgradeable firmware and same with just MP3 players. I can't wait to be able to starting going only ogg.
    • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Informative)

      by millette ( 56354 ) <robin@@@millette...info> on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:32PM (#5976482) Homepage Journal
      Actually, Tremor, the integer codec, took care of that over a ago according to the changelog. And it's released under a bsd-like license.
      • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Informative)

        by pslam ( 97660 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:51PM (#5977021) Homepage Journal
        Actually, Tremor, the integer codec, took care of that over a ago according to the changelog. And it's released under a bsd-like license.

        Unfortunately Tremor isn't a one-size-fits-all. It's got nasty things like dynamic memory allocation all over the shop and still a rather large memory overhead. Actually, to be 100% compliant with the Vorbis 1.0 spec it's rather difficult to turn out a fast and small implementation (I've been trying).

        At the moment I'm working on getting my own implementation working with an extremely small RAM overhead. It's by no means trivial getting it working on the DSPs you find in most MP3 players, and almost none of the source code to Tremor could be successfully ported to them either. I don't expect any of the source code I'm writing for my own implementation to be used as anything but a reference for writing a version to run on DSPs.

        Of course, it would have been much more difficult even starting to write my own implementation were it not for freely available specs.

    • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Informative)

      by bobm17ch ( 643515 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:33PM (#5976494)
      I`m afraid this won`t affect player support much. The device (pc/mp3player/whatever) still has to support the vorbis audio codec within the ogg wrapper. Think of ogg as a bag of revels. The bag is standardised and easy to manipulate, but you just don`t know what you`re gonna get inside. Or even if you are gonna be able to handle it :) [1] [1] I can`t decode the orange revels. My codec empties the contents of the buffer through the I/O. :p
      • Re:Hopefully (Score:3, Informative)

        by millette ( 56354 )
        That casts a shadow over my previous response [slashdot.org]... I'm never careful enough separating ogg and vorbis; like tcp and ip, really.
      • Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ramzak2k ( 596734 ) * on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:53PM (#5976663)
        Do you encode your mp3s with mp3? I guess not. Do you see my point?
        Don't convert your mp3s. Keep 'em. From now on, if you rip a new cd, use Ogg.

        Maybe on a boring afternoon you could re-rip your already ripped cd's to Ogg and send the old mp3s to the bitbucket.

        Fraunhofer's mp3pro doesn't have mp3->mp3pro converters. Why should Ogg Vorbis need that?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:22PM (#5976367)
    It's only a matter of time before Verisign decides to patent it.
  • Yippie (Score:5, Informative)

    by ergonal ( 609484 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976409)
    This is great, well done to all the xiph guys. Remember to show your support [xiph.org] by tax-deductibly donating.
  • by unixwin ( 569813 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976415) Homepage
    If so, what can one comment on the Ogg stream if its already well defined?
    I thought RFC's were proposals for eliciting peer comments/reviews??
    • Dear RFC (Score:5, Funny)

      by Letter ( 634816 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:32PM (#5976483)
      Isn't an RFC a request for comment?

      Dear RFC,

      Yes, that's what RFC stands for. Slashdot took over the commenting aspect of all RFCs, so please just post any comments you might have about RFC 3533 below.

      Sincerely,
      Letter

    • by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:38PM (#5976542) Journal
      When the RFCs were first produced, they had an almost 19th century
      character to them - letters exchanged in public debating the merits
      of various design choices for protocols in the ARPANET. As email and
      bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the network, the
      far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make
      increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion -
      reducing the need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some
      respects, leaving historians somewhat impoverished in the process.
      RFCs slowly became conclusions rather than debates.
      Straight from RFC 2555 [rfc-editor.org]
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976418)
    "OGG is better"
    "what? We're talking about music, not whatever that is..."
    "OGG is about music. It's a file format, like MP3s, only better."
    "Okay, dude, I'm sorry, I just keep missing the first thing you're saying"
    "It's OGG. O - G - G."
    "Dude, that is the most retarded name I've ever heard of... let's play some halo on my x-boxe!!!"
  • by millette ( 56354 ) <robin@@@millette...info> on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976419) Homepage Journal
    Isn't it ironic that an RFC would be published so late in the format's life? I guess the old meaning is completely obsolete, and Request For Change doesn't really fit the bill either...
  • What are the odds that Ogg will replace mp3 as the standard format for music?

    I'm curious what folks here think it would take for consumers to think of Ogg as the normal, expected format for audio.

    --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

    • I am not sure it will replace it, but there are two good reasons it could be competitive: a) It sounds better b) It is license-free I think the odds are good that OGG will be on par with MP3 within 2 or 3 years.
    • by sulli ( 195030 ) *
      Unless, I dunno, space aliens take away everyone's MP3 players and all copies of Winamp?

      Seriously, Ogg is excellent, but the old "de facto standard" problem is huge. Unless the forces of evil somehow manage to ban MP3 or AAC due to patent concerns, I don't see users switching en masse.

      • Re:Zero? (Score:2, Informative)

        by DarkBlack ( 5773 )
        It almost sounds like that you are suggesting that Winamp doesn't support ogg vorbis. It does.
        • Well that's one program down. Now how about all those portable CD/mp3 players out there (Millions of them). Car CD/MP3 players, and home equipment that play mp3 but not Ogg. Are the Ogg people going to buy new equipment for everyone? There are versions of some of that stuff that play Ogg here and there. But until it's EVERYWHERE, it's not preferrable to mp3 to consumers. The last thing consumers want is constantly having to pick and choose formats. MP3 is ingrained for the long haul. Fortunately or unfortun
          • Re:Zero? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by lvdrproject ( 626577 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:31PM (#5976903) Homepage
            You're arguing something completely different. You start out talking about software, and then you move on to hardware. Software support for Vorbis has grown exponentially since its inception, and it's no longer a problem. Anything worth its salt supports Vorbis (even WMP, if you have the DirectShow filters, i think). Winamp, Foobar2000, XMMS, &c.. Not to mention all the CD-ripping programs support it. You can even download a plug-in that allows Windows XP to provide information on Vorbis files in Explorer, just as it does with MP3s and WMAs (artist, title, bitrate, &c.).

            But you are right about the lack of hardware support. I have a couple friends that like Vorbis, and they would switch in a second, if only there was hardware support. And that seems to be the major problem. Without hardware support, Vorbis will probably remain a nerd's pipe dream forever. Hopefully, though, they're making progress on some hardware players. I think i read in an Ogg Traffic once that one of the iRiver models was tested to see if it could handle Tremor, and apparently it can, which is good news, i think. Whether or not iRiver is going to take the time to implement it is the problem. Aside from that, nobody seems to interested in Vorbis on the hardware side, except for the makers of those ugly iPod rip-offs. :p

            • Re:Zero? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by shaitand ( 626655 )
              look how long everybody and there dog was using mp3 before hardware manufacturers took the plung and started supporting it. Remember, these guys like to move slow... before mp3 the last standard for audio was compact disc (and it is certainly still not gone). Before compact disc it was tapes and before that those big black round things... i think they called them records.

              ALL of these media types were in place for a very long time (by todays technological standards) and it is unlikely that now they have t
            • You can even download a plug-in that allows Windows XP to provide information on Vorbis files in Explorer, just as it does with MP3s and WMAs

              You mean VorbixExt [ozemail.com.au]?

              Took me ages to find that, sigh :)
    • What are the odds that Ogg will replace mp3 as the standard format for music?
      1. It already has, at least for me. All of my CDs are ripped to Ogg Vorbis, primarily because I know that I'll be able to play them in perpetuity, thanks to the licensing issues.
      2. For the general population, the sad answer is that it probably never will. The lack of portable players is often cited as the barrier to widespread adoption. But while I'm sure it's a factor, I don't think it would matter anyway. After all, the world is sti
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976422)
    Everybody has heard of mp3, and a lot people have heard of DivX ;)/MPEG, but only nerds know about ogg. Its sounds stupid, it looks stupid and theres poor support for it in windows.

    If media player dosen't play it, 99% of people won't use it.

    -1, troll^H^H^Hue
    • It doesn't work out of the box but you can use media player if you install the OGG directshow filter [everwicked.com].
    • media player doesn't play divx. And I well remember when us nerds were the only ones who had heard of divx. Give it a year and the common idiot will have heard of xvid and ffmpeg4 as well, you see at least with movies, it's nerds who do the encoding because not every idiot can... but any idiot can watch the rip and think he's bright if he knows how to download the codec.

      But to be honest, most don't know about divx either yet.
  • No way (Score:5, Funny)

    by dirkdidit ( 550955 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:27PM (#5976424) Homepage
    for all you folks who won't look at something unless it has an RFC attached to it.

    That explains alot with /.ers and woman.

    /.er: I'm sorry but your breasts don't say RFC
    Woman: Excuse me?
  • RFC? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:27PM (#5976425)
    all you folks who won't look at something unless it has an RFC attached to it

    By the looks of most /. readers, they won't touch it unless it has the letters KFC attached to it.
  • by DdJ ( 10790 )
    I see this as extremely likely to increase the odds that Apple will put Ogg support into iTunes and the iPod, that hardware MP3 player manufacturers will add support for Ogg, that the TiVo will be able to play it, that the PS2 media player will be able to play it, et cetera, et cetera...
    • by StrawberryFrog ( 67065 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:39PM (#5976548) Homepage Journal
      Why would apple want to put OGG support into the iPod? MP3 is the bait, AAC is the hook. OGG isn't even a player, and apple has no percentage in making it one.

      By that I mean that MP3 support is important for market acceptance - you'll buy one for the MP3z; but AAC with all that DRM is important to the business model. Promoting another no-DRM format over AAC is not in Apple's interest.

      That said, I'd love to be wrong. The day that Apple do idealistically put OGG support into Ipod, I will buy one. Or if another manufacturer makes a good one, I'll get that instead.
    • I see this as extremely likely to increase the odds that Apple will put Ogg support into iTunes and the iPod...

      It may increase the odds, but not by much: if Apple wanted to add Ogg support, they could already have done so. However, I'm optimistic that one day they will add Ogg support.

      And, once Apple does, it's pretty much guaranteed that everybody else will follow. Wait to see how quickly popular hardware and software MP3 players add AAC support - the same thing will happen with Ogg.
  • by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:30PM (#5976463)
    An RFC is a "Request For Comment", a technical specification document put forward by anybody. As wikipedia puts it [wikipedia.org], "Few RFCs are standards but all Internet standards are recorded in RFCs."

    So what am I getting at is, realize that this hasn't been adopted as some Internet standard overnight. But it's very positive for the project to have such a well defined standards document in a familiar format!
  • Ogg or OGG? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Euphonious Coward ( 189818 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:31PM (#5976475)
    Why do the RFC page headers say "OGG" instead of "Ogg"? The headers in other RFCs aren't arbitrarily capitalized. It's hard enough convincing people that Ogg isn't an acronym without the RFC itself making our work harder.

    Can they fix this without issuing a new RFC number?

    • Re:Ogg or OGG? (Score:5, Informative)

      by .com b4 .storm ( 581701 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:38PM (#5976944)

      Why do the RFC page headers say "OGG" instead of "Ogg"? The headers in other RFCs aren't arbitrarily capitalized. It's hard enough convincing people that Ogg isn't an acronym without the RFC itself making our work harder.

      Can they fix this without issuing a new RFC number?

      To quote the RFC FAQ [rfc-editor.org]:

      4) How can I correct an error in a published RFC?
      You cannot! Once an RFC is published, it cannot be changed.
      [...]
      For both technical and editorial errors, the RFC Editor provides a list of errata [rfc-editor.org] for published RFCs. This page contains a list of errors that have been reported to the RFC Editor.


  • ...

    Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

    ...

    Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.

    ...

    This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others ... provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies


    Sooo... is distribution one of those reserved "All Rights" or not? I think "All Rights Reserved" can be considered one of the most overused catch phrases of the last 20 years. Not only is it used in a contradictory manner like here, but somehow the MPAA and RIAA and software industry seem to think they really can reserve ALL rights instead of just their exclusive ones.

    • by vanyel ( 28049 ) * on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:01PM (#5976722) Journal
      I think "All Rights Reserved" can be considered one of the most overused catch phrases of the last 20 years.

      Actually, according to copyright training I had a "well known large company" some years ago, that specific phrase is required in a couple of small countries. It probably is overused in the sense that people think it's required in more places than it actually is, but from what little I recall, trying to copyright something in a way that's valid all over is a rat's nest, Berne or no Berne.

  • by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:44PM (#5976586) Homepage Journal
    "The Ogg Encapsulation Format Version 0"

    Version 0?? I've heard of version 0.1, but never version 0. Does this mean it hasn't been started yet?
  • Cute (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:10PM (#5976778)
    "...for all you folks who won't look at something unless it has an RFC attached to it."

    I can imagine Logic taking four long seconds to come up with something that sounded smart at the time. Here are some more gems that Logic has come up with:

    "John Carmack reached 50,000 ft. with his X-Prize entry today, for those of you who don't take video games seriously unless their designer is a rocket scientist."

    "NASA today announced proof of a black hole in a nearby galaxy, for those of you who won't watch Star Trek episodes with unproven singularities."

    "Sun finally implemented generics in Java in its latest release, for those of you who only view web pages with applets written in languages with generics."
  • by aphexddb ( 87610 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:12PM (#5976793) Homepage Journal
    I just hate the name "Ogg Vorbis". I'm sure its a better format than mp3 but I just can't stand the name. "Format 3533" from the RFC would even be better.
  • Evil bit (Score:4, Funny)

    by Seth Finklestein ( 582901 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:18PM (#5976832) Journal
    I refuse to support Ogg until its streaming component adequately supports the Evil Bit [ietf.org]. Slashdot has given this so-called "Evil Bit" RFC a little lip service in the past, but I think it's high time we brought it out into the open.
  • BAh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Loosewire ( 628916 ) * on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:19PM (#5976836) Homepage Journal
    That sladhot "gramophone" logo has been used so many times for "RIAA Does something else evil" stories everytime i see it i get angry :-(
    Good to see Ogg being recognised like this - maybe more manufacturers will incorporate it into devices now.
  • Status of Ogg FLAC ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wossName ( 24185 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:35PM (#5976929)
    It has been pretty quiet since the announcement about the FLAC project joining Xiph.org. The Ogg project page still links to the FLAC SourceForge page. Does anyone know what the status of Ogg FLAC is ?
  • by Anonymous Coward
    On a distantly related topic, are there any portable music players that can play OGG Vorbis audio files available for sale today? Sure, I see announcements about this one or that one that will support OGG Vorbis in a future firmware update. Sorry, I want it NOW! And I don't want to have to resort to a hack either.

    I want a device with support that works today.

    Yes, I'd also like the option of either a hard-drive or non-hard-drive device (for more storage, or for jogging), USB 2 or Firewire, and a simple
  • something to care about.

    I'll take any RFC over your lame constitution, any day.

If all else fails, lower your standards.

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