News Mozilla offers grant to develop Ogg

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/01/28/mozilla-offers-grant-to-develop-ogg/1

The Mozilla Foundation has put the Wikimedia Foundation in charge of a $100,000 grant to improve the Ogg Theora and Vorbis media codecs.

 

open standard = good.

 

Well it can only be a good thing really.

 

it still baffles me why more MP3 players don't use Ogg - it's FREE TO USE so what's wrong with just adding it in? Ity costs them nothing to add in the codec!

 

QFT

 

So long as everything in the Ogg container is supported, including FLAC, I'm happy.
I'm still glad that HTML 5 won't make it a requirement though, as not giving developers an 'open' choice with what formats to use would just be hypocritical. Still, I'd like to see Ogg get more popular as it should then encourage a bigger move to a DRM-free world and less dominated by proprietary standards (e.g. Flash, Java, Silverlight).

 

Xiph.Org Foundation has FLAC, Ogg and Theroa under them so am glad Mozilla and Opera will support ogg/theroa
might well support flac later

i dont have that many songs in ogg yet but its a exellent audio codec that beats mp3 hands down

flac is heaven and got all my cds in it ;D

i wish also matoska will be supported, it supports steaming
http://www.matroska.org/

 

Also Theora codec really needed an overhaul as it lacks a lot to be considered a usable video codec. H.264/AVC is far more advanced and is the defacto standard for High definition content on the internet today.

HTML5's video tag should allow for any kinds of formats and I would assume it's up to the browser maker to implement the video codec support where Ogg Vorbis/Theora is the required minimum.

Also people bashing on Flash,Silverlight and Java don't really know what they are doing. These technologies were created to fill a void on the web. Existing technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) can't offer multimedia in the same way. The Web is a patchwork of different technologies mixed together and I hope HTML5 with it's Video support at least can remove the need for Flash just for a simple thing as video. While Flash,Silverlight and Java will remain to be used for other multimedia content.

While I'm not really impressed by HTML5 (too little too late) it's a step in the right direction.

 

My Mp3 player does support Ogg. Now adays most mp3 players decode everything in very cheap dedicated hardware custom built for the file formats they support, hence some of them are simply not capable of playing unsupported formats. Strangely enough my mp3 player can play mp3, wmv and ogg but can't play wav files. Again it goes back to the hardware issue. Larger players or players that decode in software would have no problem supporting any and all formats.

 

Hooray for open standards!