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I'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

I'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 ago
Your 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Ogg 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 ago
I'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).
- jfindley 10y ago
  I think people interested in AAC probably aren't using it at low bitrates, so I'm not sure how meaningful that is. At more reasonable bitrates for people who care about quality (and thus are using AAC over MP3 in the first place) I don't think there's enough difference to discern on most listening devices - but I've not done any sort of scientific testing between the two myself, so I could very well be wrong on this. FLAC vs ALAC is a much stronger argument IMO - though elsewhere in these comments there's a suggestion that ALAC was chosen as it was cheaper to decode on Apple's hardware at the time, which if true would be a reasonable motivation.
TD-Linux 10y ago
The author of Ogg wrote a reply to that article: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.... Anyway, I highly doubt the design of the Ogg container had anything to do with the popularity of Vorbis vs MP3 - most users of Vorbis used the Ogg container, and some of the criticisms in the original article apply to MP3 (ever tried to seek a VBR MP3 file?)

upofadown 10y ago

Your 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 ago
I 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 ago
Ogg 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 ago

I'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).

jfindley 10y ago
I think people interested in AAC probably aren't using it at low bitrates, so I'm not sure how meaningful that is. At more reasonable bitrates for people who care about quality (and thus are using AAC over MP3 in the first place) I don't think there's enough difference to discern on most listening devices - but I've not done any sort of scientific testing between the two myself, so I could very well be wrong on this. FLAC vs ALAC is a much stronger argument IMO - though elsewhere in these comments there's a suggestion that ALAC was chosen as it was cheaper to decode on Apple's hardware at the time, which if true would be a reasonable motivation.

TD-Linux 10y ago

The author of Ogg wrote a reply to that article: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.... Anyway, I highly doubt the design of the Ogg container had anything to do with the popularity of Vorbis vs MP3 - most users of Vorbis used the Ogg container, and some of the criticisms in the original article apply to MP3 (ever tried to seek a VBR MP3 file?)