9 ms·
RMS on the Ogg Vorbis license (2001)
- krylon 10y agoIt is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3 is still abundant. I was especially annoyed when I still had an iPod, because substantial parts of my music library are in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which Apple could support without paying a single cent in licensing, yet iPod - at least a couple of years back - only supported MP3 and AAC. :-| I would assume the patents on MP3 have expired by now, is anyone in a position to confirm or deny this?
- TheDong 10y agoGIF patents are expired I believe, but I dont' think MP3 is safe until 2018. This patent, for example, doesn't expire until near the end of 2017: https://www.google.com/patents/US5703999?dq=5,703,999 https://www.google.com/patents/US5703999?dq=5,703,999 Edit: This is supported by the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and... > In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 (see below). The majority of MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2015
- yuhong 10y agoThe expiration date is wrong. Even before 1995, it was 17 years after publication or 20 years after priority date.
- TheDong 10y agoFine, another example: https://www.google.com/patents/US5924060 https://www.google.com/patents/US5924060 This one was filed in 97 so +20 is 2017 (because the 20 years is from filing date, yes?)
- yuhong 10y agoI think it is priority date, which is often the filing date of the earliest patent in a chain of continuations. For fun trivia, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent
- redcap 10y agoIt's from the priority date, which was Aug 29, 1986 making this expired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_S...
- tzs 10y agoFrom 35 USC 154(a): (2)Term.— Subject to the payment of fees under this title, such grant shall be for a term beginning on the date on which the patent issues and ending 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, if the application contains a specific reference to an earlier filed application or applications under section 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c), from the date on which the earliest such application was filed. (3)Priority.— Priority under section 119, 365(a), 365(b), 386(a), or 386(b) shall not be taken into account in determining the term of a patent. For this patent, there is a chain of specific references to earlier filed applications, but I'm not sure which of those, if any, are under section 120, 121, 365(c) or 386(c) and so affect the expiration date of the patent.
- tacos 10y agoApple's needless introduction of ALAC, basically a slightly dumber FLAC, was inexcusable.
- spiznnx 10y agoThere were some vague reasons behind it. Apple claimed it improves battery life for mobile devices (possibly because it is 'dumber') and it's based on the mp4 container format used by other Apple-preferred formats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless#Codec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless#Codec
- tacos 10y agoUsing the same file extension for non-lossy and lossy music... ugh. If they wanted to sell DRM protected lossless files I'd even cut them some slack, but they didn't. This was just poorly thought out. Likewise both formats are trivial to decode; I'm not buying the power argument. The smaller .flac file likely wins anyway.
- asabil 10y agoUnless you have a hardware decoder
- TD-Linux 10y agoAccording to rather old Rockbox benchmarks, their implementation of ALAC requires 3-4x the clockspeed as FLAC: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison On a positive note, Apple later released a reference ALAC implementation under the Apache 2.0 license, which includes a patent grant, so the damage is mostly limited to consumer annoyance.
- vizeroth 10y agoThey could have stuck with the .mp4 extension, but they were attempting to reduce the potential for confusion. It's a file extension, once we embrace the fact that it is just a hint (and can be a lie), it doesn't really matter so much. The MPEG-4 format was based on the QuickTime format, so it shouldn't be any surprise that Apple prefers to go with an MPEG-4 format even when an acceptable alternative is available. The reality is that Apple doesn't support very many alternatives to MPEG-4 formats, and they probably wouldn't support MP3 if it weren't for the fact that they wouldn't have been able to take a significant position in the market for digital media players without MP3 playback. The same will probably never be the case for Ogg or FLAC.
- bydo 10y agoVorbis and FLAC may be distributed under very permissive open-source licenses, but they may also infringe on software patents, which is ostensibly why Apple has avoided them. They also may not, but under the current US patent system we can't really know until a court case; it does make sense for Apple (or any other company trying to avoid paying huge sums to patent trolls) not to test these waters. Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass the buck.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago> Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass the buck. Not really. Someone else could pop up and claim to have a patent over AAC or MP3, just as easily as they could for any other codec. Licensing a patent from one party makes absolutely no guarantee that someone else couldn't pop up with another patent and either payment or destroy a product. And I seriously doubt that a patent license for AAC or MP3 came with indemnity against any third-party patent claim.
- CamperBob2 10y agoNot really. Someone else could pop up and claim to have a patent over AAC or MP3, just as easily as they could for any other codec. And in fact, that's exactly what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft_Corp%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft_Co... A $1.5 billion jury verdict was handed down against Microsoft, which was overturned by the judge.
- shmerl 10y ago> but they may also infringe on software patents, which is ostensibly why Apple has avoided them. No, it's not the reason. Anything can infringe on unknown patents, even same AAC. Opus and Vorbis aren't any more risky, Opus is actually much less. Apple are just jerks who don't want that barriers for entry (requirement to use patented codecs) would disappear.
- gsnedders 10y agoIt's an argument against being the first major company to ship something; Vorbis has had nobody sue any of the major companies who have been shipping it for over a decade. The longer other major companies have been shipping without being sued the more likely it is nobody else will surface.
- shmerl 10y agoSome (Apple) staunchly refuse to support free codecs. They on purpose put blockers for wider adoption, so the above is not surprising. I make it a point to buy music in FLAC, and then encode it in Opus for playback (that's why I try to avoid buying when FLAC / lossless is not available). But so far no store sells music in Opus optionally.
- tacos 10y agoProbably because there's no widely available encoder. Why hasn't this been folded into ffmpeg/sox/etc?
- shmerl 10y agoNot sure what you mean. opusenc works just fine and is perfectly portable. ffmpeg also supports it through libopus for quite some time. See https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#toc-libopus-1 https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#toc-libopus-1
- tacos 10y agoIt's decode only for some reason. For whatever reason sox and libsndfile won't touch it; ffmpeg won't encode it. And iOS and Android browsers won't play it. Shame because it's clearly the current winner.
- shmerl 10y agoffmpeg should encode it if it was built with --enable-libopus. May be you are using one without it? Firefox supports Opus everywhere. Chrome I think should too, since it's needed for WebRTC. Safari obviously doesn't, as I said, Apple can't stand free codecs.
- tacos 10y agohttp://caniuse.com/#feat=opus http://caniuse.com/#feat=opus Strangely absent across all mobile platforms at the moment. And even Firefox won't play it as .webm only .ogg. (Huh?) Man, why is audio always so wonky?
- spilk 10y agoSpotify uses Ogg Vorbis for all its streams, I believe. But I guess that doesn't really count when it's heavily DRM encumbered and delivered by unfree software.
- TD-Linux 10y agoIt also found a niche market in video games, where it's very common to this day (there's an outdated list on the xiph wiki [1]). Netflix also used it on the Wii when they didn't have a system decoder available [2]. [1] https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Games_that_use_Vorbis https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Games_that_use_Vorbis [2] http://blog.streamingmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2013SMEast-C101.pdf http://blog.streamingmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/20...
- cpach 10y agoI wonder if they still use Vorbis now that so many use Spotify on their smartphones. Lack of hardware decoding might be an issue.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI think it "counts" in the sense that Spotify had the freedom to do that, which is exactly what Stallman was fighting for.
- unixhero 10y agoAndroid reads Ogg and Flac natively. It is being used by Spotify, and in most games internally, especially indie games. Ogg didn't win, but not far from it either.
- vbernat 10y agoAt the time, Ogg Vorbis was difficult to hardware decode and its impact on the battery life was noticeable. Other decoders have been introduced since but I don't know if hardware decoding is here or not.
- TD-Linux 10y agoTremor, the fixed-point decoder of Ogg Vorbis, came out in 2002. According to the Rockbox performance data, it requires about the same clock speed as AAC-LC. iPods and similar generally don't have fixed-function audio decoders. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison
- hvidgaard 10y ago> Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate That is not my experience at all. If I need to encode in a lossy format, LAME has always produced a smaller transparent encode than Vorbis. But if I've been bandwidth/space restricted, Vorbis and AAC have been better than MP3.
- LeoNatan25 10y agoCalling MP3 "transparent" even at 320kbps is such a far reach. Especially in treble and bass, lack in detail, etc. It's just a limitation to the codec. In comparison, AAC produces a much higher quality encodes, which somewhat approach a "transparent" lossy encode.
- hvidgaard 10y agoI have yet to see anyone being able to tell the me what sample was the mp3 with any consistency in an ABX test. I don't know how other encoders perform, but LAME is producing really really good results.
- tacos 10y agoThere is no excuse for MP3 in 2016. Like parents who eagerly took "baby's first step" photos with the first iPhone camera... oops. As technologists and influencers we should help migrate people forward. Ya hear me, SoundCloud?
- ashitlerferad 10y agoThese days Ogg Opus is a better audio codec than any other lossless one.
- gosub 10y agoyou mean lossy?
- ashitlerferad 10y agoyes
- legulere 10y agoYou simply don't need to be the best to win, you just need to be good enough. If your technic is good enough other soft factors are way more important. In the case here I think it's mostly that mp3 was first to market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Going_public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Going_public
- TickleSteve 10y agoAbsolutely this.... What a lot of us techies fail to realise is that the world at large does not care about technical elegance and purity. They care about the end result. Packaging and aesthetics do matter to the world at large... therefore enough features, nicely packaged and sold well.... will win.
- bsder 10y ago> It is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3 is still abundant. MP3 requires far less memory to decode than Ogg Vorbis does. This was a big deal at the time as RAM cells added cost to the MP3 decoders. Now, with CELT (which later became the Opus codec) this was not true. But it took a long time to get there.
- orkoden 10y agoComparing Vorbis to MP3 nowadays doesn't make a lot of sense. Compare it to AAC.
- xorcist 10y agoOpus, the a descendant of Vorbis, is standardized by the IETF and (correct me if I'm wrong) mandatory-to-implement for WebRTC. And since WebRTC is supposed to take over our lives, perhaps Vorbvis did win, after all.
- microcolonel 10y agoOpus is not descended from Vorbis. It's descended from CELT and SILK. CELT was developed by Xiph.org, SILK by Skype. The CELT portion handles complex, arbitrary audio like music and sound effects. The SILK part handles voice. Xiph, Skype, and IETF (among others IIRC) pooled their expertise in CELT, SILK, and the standards track respectively. Xiph.org did develop Vorbis though.
- jfindley 10y agoI've heard numerous complaints from people with deep technical knowledge in this domain that Ogg is a terrible format - for example, see: http://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/ http://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/ MP3 is used where simplicity and compatibility are prioritised - Ogg is neither simple nor widely compatible. Where quality is prioritised, there are other alternatives providing at least as good quality. So asking "Why is Ogg not used over MP3 because quality" misses the point - MP3 wasn't chosen for premium quality, and Ogg is awful at the things MP3 is good at. Apple supports MP3 for compatibility/simplicity, AAC for quality (lossy), and ALAC for quality (lossless). I don't really see how Ogg competes on a technical level with any of those, for their respective purpose.
- upofadown 10y agoYour link is to an argument against the ides of using Ogg as a general purpose container format (for video in particular). This is about something different; Vorbis encoded audio which traditionally comes in an Ogg container. I have never heard the argument that the Ogg container format somehow makes Vorbis inferior to other codecs in practice.
- jfindley 10y agoI think that's misrepresenting the article somewhat. It mentions video in several places, because a lot of the issues stem at least in part from the complexities introduced by trying to be a general purpose container, but there are many significant problems with use of it as an audio format besides these.
- cm3 10y agoOgg containers have this problem that to change the metadata you have to rewrite the whole file whereas with ID3 it's always the last bytes at the end and highly efficient to edit.
- adrusi 10y agoI've dealt with the ogg container format a little and from what I saw it seemed quite reasonable, at least for the codecs it is typically used for, but for the sake of argument I'll assume everything in that article is correct. In that case, ogg competes because it beats AAC on quality per unit size (low bitrate vorbis supposedly beats out low bitrate AAC at least, and I guess opus is supposed to be really good), and FLAC, which usually comes in its own container format but sometimes is distributed in an ogg, has smaller file sizes than ALAC. I don't think AAC had much traction before it became the iTunes Store format, and ALAC remains one of the least common codecs. Both of them would have lost out to vorbis and flac. Perhaps the reason they were chosen is because they have standardized DRM solutions (at least AAC).
- TheDong 10y agoFunctionally, it doesn't make a difference if the patents are expired if licensing fees are still being extracted. And they are. It's still way too expensive for the little-company or little-man to go to court over it, even if it's obviously false.
- epistasis 10y agoMP3 seems to be one of the cases where patents seem to have not hindered the spread of information. The inventor made a small amount of money, and decodes and encoders proliferated. MP3 dominated music. And there's no shortage of open source (which, I know, is not what RMS wants) code available. This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.
- simula67 10y agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and... "MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005." Is that small amount of money ?
- dingo_bat 10y agoCompared to the value of the music/audio distributed through mp3? I'd say that's a pittance.
- orkoden 10y agoBuying a complete set of codecs from Fluendo for Linux costs 20$. That includes Windows Media, h264 and others. That's not too much I think. http://www.oneplaydirect.com/oneplay/oneplay-codec-pack/ http://www.oneplaydirect.com/oneplay/oneplay-codec-pack/
- JoshTriplett 10y agoFor many years, nobody shipped implementations of MP3 at all; there are still Linux distributions today that don't provide support for MP3 out of the box. Many don't support MP4/h264, either.
- throwawaykf05 10y agoIn fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia: > Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11] This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoI think the situation in the second to last paragraph is now the usual case, not the exceptional case, as defensibility in today's market has shifted from technical feats to network effects.