Ogg Vorbis: MP3 Contender?

With Linux becom­ing a strong alter­na­tive to Microsoft’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, some mem­bers of the open source com­mu­nity are set­ting their sights on a new tar­get: the music indus­try. The group has intro­duced a new sound for­mat called Ogg Vor­bis, which promises to deliver bet­ter sound qual­ity or smaller dig­i­tal music files than the pop­u­lar MP3 file format.

Ogg Vor­bis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose com­pressed audio for­mat for high qual­ity (44.1–48.0kHz, 16+ bit, poly­phonic) audio and music at fixed and vari­able bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps per channel

accord­ing to a state­ment on the offi­cial Ogg Vor­bis site.

MP3 was designed by com­mit­tees so it ended up with a bunch of use­less junk in it says Jack Mof­fitt, project man­ager on Ogg Vor­bis. Because we designed Vor­bis from the ground up, we have stream­lined a lot of the tech­nol­ogy and cre­ated bet­ter algo­rithms for encod­ing and decoding.

The new for­mat, which uses the exten­sion .OGG, was devel­oped as an alter­na­tive to MP3 and already has a long his­tory. Seven years ago, Chris Mont­gomery, now one of the lead­ers on the Ogg Vor­bis project, wanted to burn his CD col­lec­tion to his com­puter. How­ever, the hard drive he had at the time was too small to carry a lot of files. Mont­gomery started to write some audio com­pres­sion soft­ware libraries to fit more files on his hard drive. He ended up devel­op­ing a com­plete CD rip­ping pack­age called CD Para­noia. A cou­ple of years ago, Mof­fitt called Mont­gomery and asked him if he wanted to join ICast, a CMGI backed start-up that was to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the music industry.

Mean­while, MP3 was devel­oped at the Fraun­hofer Insti­tute in Erlan­gen, Ger­many, under the lead­er­ship of Dieter Seitzer and Heinz Ger­hauser. Fraun­hofer did not seek to col­lect roy­al­ties on decoders or from com­pa­nies using MP3 to stream music. How­ever, Fraun­hofer announced last Sep­tem­ber that it would begin to seek roy­al­ties. Under the new MP3 license, soft­ware pro­duc­ers and hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers would have to pay five dol­lars per copy of their soft­ware or hard­ware sold. Fur­ther­more, MP3 sites would have to pay one per­cent of their rev­enues or one cent per down­load to dis­trib­ute MP3 encoded files. Fraun­hofer Insti­tute has licensed its rights to Thom­son Mul­ti­me­dia, which col­lects the grow­ing patent roy­al­ties.

While ICast ended up clos­ing its doors, as many other dot­coms did in 2000, the project con­tin­ued. When word spread that MP3 could become a fairly expen­sive solu­tion, Ogg Vor­bis started get­ting more atten­tion from soft­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers, hard­ware mak­ers, and the gen­eral music community.

Among the fea­tures that Ogg Vor­bis devel­op­ers tout as an advan­tage over MP3 are bet­ter sounds, smaller foot­print and bet­ter recov­ery when stream­ing a file. “MP3 uses fil­ter banks to encode the sig­nal and MDCP to decode it, which results in a loss of qual­ity,” said Mof­fitt. “Vor­bis skips the fil­ter bank and relies solely on MDCP, which means that we end up with smaller files for the same qual­ity or larger files with bet­ter sound”.

Another rea­son for the bet­ter sound Vor­bis offers is that it sup­ports mul­ti­ple chan­nel encod­ing. Ini­tially, MP3 only encoded a left and a right chan­nel, to direct the sound to a two speaker set and cre­ate a stereo effect. How­ever, new tech­nolo­gies and an increase in the aver­age num­ber of speak­ers in audio­philes’ house­hold means that some har­mon­ics are lost in the process. Vor­bis allows a per­son to encode their sound file across mul­ti­ple chan­nels, which gives the sound greater depth. While Vor­bis devel­op­ers claim that it is the only codec to sup­port mul­ti­ple chan­nels, some have their doubts. “I think all state of the art codecs today have capa­bil­ity for mul­ti­ple chan­nels encod­ing” said Gary Green­baum, codec group man­ager for Real Net­works. “If you don’t sup­port mul­ti­ple chan­nel encod­ing these days, you’re not even in the game.”

On the stream­ing end, Vor­bis can also chop up just a few pack­ets instead of going between streams. Broad­cast­ers just need to encode their sig­nal once and use the adjustable bit rate depend­ing on band­width. “One of the nice thing in Vor­bis is that it’s built to sup­port bitrate scal­ing said Mof­fitt. As you go through the packet, you need less and less data. If the band­width drops, you’ll get a slight qual­ity reduc­tion but you will still get audio and because we can we can adjust the bitrate on the fly depend­ing on a band­width. Real Networks’s Sure­Stream on the other hand, just switches back and forth between dif­fer­ent sig­nals instead of adjust­ing the sig­nal on the fly.

We’re going to the peo­ple pro­duc­ing music and the peo­ple pro­duc­ing soft­ware and ask them to con­vert, not to the users” he added, men­tion­ing that Vor­bis was already included in a few gam­ing devel­op­ment pack­ages like F-MOD and Open AL.

Fur­ther­more, the audio for­mat is now sup­ported by a num­ber of music encod­ing soft­ware pack­ages like the pop­u­lar SIREN Juke­box 2.0 from Sonic Foundry and the Phat­Noise Music Juke­box. “Our goal is not to kill MP3,” said Mof­fitt. “Dig­i­tal music may always be called MP3 but I won’t nec­es­sar­ily be in the MP3 format.”

On the dis­tri­b­u­tion end, Ogg Vor­bis is cur­rently sup­ported in Freenet, Gnutella and Nap­ster has announced that it will sup­port the for­mat in the 3.0 ver­sion of its client. “It’s been really amaz­ing,” said Mof­fit, “all the play­ers have been com­ing to us, telling us that they would use the tech­nol­ogy in their pack­ages. Michael Robert­son of MP3.com was an early sup­porter of our tech­nol­ogy and a lot of his devel­op­ers are famil­iar with Vorbis.”

Beyond the MP3 licens­ing issues, one of the rea­son given for releas­ing a free open source codec was free speech. “If you are talk­ing about pay­ing roy­al­ties to a com­pany, it can impede free speech by giv­ing that com­pany the pos­si­bil­ity to decide who uses the tech­nol­ogy and who doesn’t” said Mof­fitt, adding that Radio Free Ser­bia, which was instru­men­tal in the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of Ser­bia, was run­ning Ogg Vor­bis through Ice­Cast as their stream­ing tech­nol­ogy. Another exam­ple of an orga­ni­za­tion using Ogg Vor­bis for online protest was that of KPFA, an online radio sta­tion set up by fired employ­ees of a San Fran­cisco area pub­lic radio sta­tion as an alter­na­tive to the sta­tion they had all been fired from due to a for­mat change. “Com­bine Ogg Vor­bis with Freenet and all of a sud­den no one can stop free speech,” said Moffit.

But while it is sup­ported in the Sonique player and there is a plug-in avail­able for the WinAmp player, few of the larger audio player com­pa­nies have given much sup­port to Ogg Vor­bis. Anne Burkart, spokesper­son for Winamp, said that native sup­port of the Ogg Vor­bis for­mat would “depend on where things go in the mar­ket and indus­try,” stress­ing that “the phi­los­o­phy behind winamp is to remain for­mat agnostic.”

“We’ve done our due dili­gence on it and we don’t believe it’s state of the art,” said Green­baum. “At the cur­rent time, Ogg Vor­bis is a very weak sig­nal we’re lis­ten­ing to. Fur­ther­more, we’ve heard that there may be some intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues related to the Ogg Vor­bis codec.”

Whether this is true, ana­lysts say Thom­son and the Fraun­hofer Insti­tute are likely to file patent law­suits the moment Vor­bis appears to be a viable mar­ket can­di­date. By cre­at­ing a per­cep­tion of uncer­tainty around Vor­bis’ future, MP3’s par­ents could pre­vent con­ser­v­a­tive dig­i­tal music com­pa­nies from adopt­ing it.

“The best solu­tion around the IP issue is to have them write their own plug in,” said Green­baum. Mof­fitt is already work­ing on a RealPlayer plug-in for Ogg Vor­bis, which he intends to release in Feb­ru­ary, after beta 4 of the encoder and decoder are released.

Microsoft has no plans to sup­port Ogg Vor­bis in the Win­dows Media Player, accord­ing to a Microsoft spokesper­son, who also pointed out that the recently unveiled Ver­sion 8 Win­dows Media audio and video tech­nol­ogy pro­vides nearly 3 times the amount of near-CD qual­ity music com­pared to MP3 tech­nol­ogy. While Ogg Vor­bis devel­op­ers have looked at Microsoft’s tech­nol­ogy, they are not devel­op­ing a plug-in for the Win­dows Media Player. “Microsoft is destroy­ing the efforts of other peo­ple because they don’t give you any SDK for mak­ing exten­sions or adding new for­mats in the Microsoft media player,” said Mof­fitt. “As a result, they are slow­ing down progress in the audio indus­try as a whole.”

But sup­port from the indus­try may not be as easy as it appears. MP3 has ingrained itself as a de facto stan­dard and the licens­ing issues may make it more appeal­ing to the RIAA, which has been look­ing for a way for music com­pa­nies to get remu­ner­ated for online music. Right now, we’re try­ing to focus on the audio tech­nol­ogy, admits Mof­fit, adding that dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment com­pa­nies can write wrap­pers that go around Ogg Vor­bis to dis­trib­ute the files but secu­rity is not our pri­mary con­cern at this point. We just want to develop an audio for­mat that is more open and sounds bet­ter than MP3.”