[TriLUG] Ogg vs. mp3

[Chris Hedemark]

On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 11:10 AM, Mark Turner wrote:

> I think Ogg's sound better, especially the lower frequencies. They also
> tend to be smaller in size.
>
> And, yeah. There's that patent-free part, too. :)

Commercial vendors hadn't really been supporting ogg for awhile.  They 
may have been afraid of reading GPL code to figure it out or something, 
I don't know.  But earlier this month I got an RFC announcement 
pointing to ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3533.txt which should 
describe the ogg format.  I haven't read it yet, but the summary for 
the RFC claims:

> This document describes the Ogg bitstream format version 0, which is a 
> general, freely-available encapsulation format for media streams.  It 
> is able to encapsulate any kind and number of video and audio encoding 
> formats as well as other data streams in a single bitstream.

The version number might scare off commercial vendors who wish to 
support ogg in their proprietary products, since it would seem to imply 
that ogg is not yet stabilized in a way that lends itself to lower code 
maintenance.

For now I continue to use MP3 because:
1) Just about everyone out there can handle it.  Promotes sharing.
2) If I want to get a hardware MP3 player at some point, I don't want 
to have to re-rip all my CD's to have a file format the player 
understands.
3) I don't have the auditory acuity anymore to tell the difference 
between ogg & mp3 quality (must have been that Iron Maiden concert back 
in 1988... killed my hearing)

--

Chris Hedemark
UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available.  No job 
too small!