I'd like to figure out how much demand there is for the empeg / RioCar to support the .ogg format.

Eh... This poll is proof that statistics don't lie, statisticians do... You could put *ANY* feature in a poll that says "should they support this feature" and the results will be a resounding yes. I think the poll should make more of an effort to make it clear that incorporating OGG will take up development time that could be spent on other features.

I think OGG support would be nice, but would only be relevant if OGG becomes a more dominant format, or, more at it, if MP3 starts to decline due to royalty concerns or whatever. If you ask me, *so much* work has been done by so many people to milk the most quality out of the MP3 format that it will be difficult to make that kind of progress with OGG.

Furthermore, there is NO available implementation of OGG Vorbis which uses integer math, so this feature CAN NOT be implemented until that happens. A quick forum search confirms that this has been mentioned many times, including very recently.

I would answer "yes" to this question but if the question said "would you like to see OGG support and potentially have other future features compromised" I would say no. It'd be nice if the forum allowed you to have polls that ranked things from 1 to 10 so we could throw up a list of features and people could rank them in order. If OGG was one of these, I dare say it would be in sixth or seventh place, behind things like cross-fading, voice recognition, a plugin-style visuals API, customizable info modes, etc.

A side note to tfabris: In checking to see if Ogg was mentioned in the FAQ, I noticed that the relevant FAQ entry has an out-of-date disclaimer stating that WMA has not been incorporated into the software yet. I know 2.0 final will be the first official WMA release, but it seems incorrect to say that it's "temporarily disabled."

ya ogg just dosnt excite me that much, as of right now the empeg car plays music no problem, and for us with sub woofer setup, and having all the speakers comming from one pre-out and the sub on its own preout, i just dont feel it being a need.. theres lot of stuff that the empeg cant do that woudl be cool do have in the future.. my main one is visual plug-ins but thats also not on top of everyones list, cross-fading woudl be cool as well.. but some of these cool wish's will only be wishes

In reply to:

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I think OGG support would be nice, but would only be relevant if OGG becomes a more dominant format, or, more at it, if MP3 starts to decline due to royalty concerns or whatever.

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How can it become more dominant if harwares dont support it?
I did read some other posts on .ogg actually and the most recent one mentions another decoder that possibly runs on a ARM processor.
I didnt make the poll to see if development on .ogg support is more or less important to people than other features. I wanted to see if there was interest in general.
I only asked whether people want support for it in the future, not whether it should take priority over crossfading etc.

I didnt make the poll to see if development on .ogg support is more or less important to people than other features. I wanted to see if there was interest in general.

Okay, I understand that. There definitely has been some discussion about it, but I wouldn't say it's a "hot button issue." Your "chicken and egg" theory is right, in that it can't become more dominant if it's not supported on as many platforms as possible, but then again, it's not vital to get it on a lot of platforms unless it *significantly* outperforms MP3.

I guess I just can't see how someone would say "no" to this poll unless they were thinking of it as a distraction from development of another feature. Who *wouldn't* want it to support another format if it was a freebie?

From what I've read, the ARM support was implemented by the Ogg folks under contract from a third party with the condition that it not be released to the public. Unfortunately, this means that the Ogg folks won't ever release an integer math version, since it would be impossible for them to reimplement it without breaking that contract. It will be up to a fourth party to do it. I'd start on it, but I have no idea where to start. And just for the sake of making sure, I compiled up ogg123 with its related libraries for the empeg and tried to decode a file and it was agonizingly slow. It was probably 20% of real-time.

This is correct. Iobjects got monty to write a decoder for the arm platform under contract. Ive seen him giving the guy from phatnoise some tips on how to get the decoder going. Phatnoise may release the decoder as open source just to keep the iobjects guy from selling his, apparantly hes not a very easy person to deal with. wfaulk, if you want the little bit of info I have, pm me, and i'll forward it to you.

Sean

Theres very little demand, or it would have been done by now. If you really want a decoder, you would have to write it yourself, and the empeg guys would consider putting in the player software. If I knew how I would do it myself.

Sean

For the love of god, please don't. I don't think I can handle re-ripping all of my music if there turns out to be something better. And I don't see how it could be, my VBR MP3's with the quality cranked all the way up sound quite perfect to me.

Please don't make me kill another week popping my CD's in and out of the computer!

mp3 is going to be pretty dominate for awhile for one reason, its not copy protected, all these new formats are being copy protected by law.. making ti hard to trade, and put music on devices such as the empeg and not being able to take them back off again without messing with them.. useless i tell you

ogg is not copy protected.

Why should I care about ogg vorbis?

Calvin

Why should I care about ogg vorbis?

You shouldn't. You're an empeg-car owner, and your hard disk storage capability is very large.

Ogg supposedly sounds better than MP3 at a given bit rate. But that's only important if your storage is limited. With an empeg-car, since you have so much storage, you can encode MP3s at a very high bit rate, and not be able to tell the difference between an MP3 and an OGG file.

Yep! I have WAV files in my empeg. I can see the case being made for a 10GB empeg however.

Calvin

Because Fraunhofer wouldn't (shouldn't) be breathing down your neck. (Technically, LAME, etc. are violating FhG's patents.) Other folks have claimed that the MP3 format has been tweaked within an inch of its life, while Vorbis is still fairly underdeveloped and already sounds as good as MP3 at similar bitrates. Ogg has builtin streaming metadata abilities, not just the hacked-on additions of ID3. Vorbis can support more than two channels (up to 255, IIRC), which, while not an issue for the empeg, as it can only play two channels, could a huge benefit for other players, especially when dealing with video. Also, it's possible to do what they refer to as ``bitrate scaling'', whereby frames can be edited out of a Vorbis file, reducing its bitrate without reencoding or generating double artifacts. This is very nice for being able to create reference sized Vorbis files and then chop them down to appropriate bitrates for different devices. I'm sure I've missed some stuff, but that's a good overview of why we should care.

That's what I was thinking a while ago... Considering how fast disk size increases and its price decreases, I would not be surprised if in a couple of years compression formats like MP3 became "obsolete" and people, including us here after a disk upgrade on our empegs, start using directly .wav files on their brand new 10-Terabyte-hdds...

I agree with the eternal growth of HDD size but I'd like to ask you Taym if you are not using compressed zip files because now HDD drive are 40 GO ?

Yes maybe mp3 format will dissapear one day but there will always be such format with improved audio quality but not necessarly with file size reduction but audioi capacities nver equaled ..

I think DVD Audio could give impressive sensations like to be near a Philarmonic Orchestra in your Car ....

Yes, I agree we all still use ZIP files, but that's a siglthly different story, I think. I was just thinking that MP3 is still quality loss format, and in few years there will be no need to reduce quality at all. I can imagine a different format than .wav that lets you add info like ID3, Lyrics, Karaoke functions and what not, and that maybe uses a a quality lossless compression, just not to waste hdd space for no reason, but just that. Still we will be using much larger files, and we will not mind ad all. Well, just guessing...

There are a number of codecs that are lossless and include metadata. One of them, FLAC, has a good comparison of a bunch of them.

I just wanted to say that I own a 10GB and a 60GB empeg and Ogg Vorbis is my #1 wish list item. I want it as much for technical reasons as political ones. Technically it is far superior to the mp3 and wma formats. Politically, widespread adoption of ogg would be a severe blow to the megalo corps like MS and Fraunhofer who want to control the technical aspects of our entertainment as much as the copyright industry wants to control the content and accessibility of our entertainment.

Right now ogg faces the chicken-or-the-egg problem - anything that helps to spread the adoption of ogg today will have a huge ripple effect down the road a few years from now. Inversely, anything that impedes the uptake of ogg today, like this whole integer implementation for ARM issue, could result in the premature death of ogg.

Ogg may not seem like much of an improvement to most people, but widespread adoption has the potential to make the future of digital entertainment a lot better for all consumers, and many smaller companies too.

As an owner of a ReplayTV 4k, I appreicate how SonicBlue is going to bat in the court of law to fight for our rights to do PVRish things with television shows. I hope that the guys at SB could see that implementing Ogg in all of their rio line is just another battle on the same front, and this one is a lot cheaper since lawyers (probably) don't need to get involved.

Oddly, I forgot my number one reason why you should care about Ogg Vorbis.

It does not have the gap-at-the-beginning or gap-at-the-end problem that mp3 does that results in the small hiccup that occurs between mp3 tracks.

I think JerryW and wfaulk pointed out exactly why YOU should care about ogg Vorbis.

empeg is open souce
mp3 is patented (lame is open souce but illegal)
ogg vorbis is open source

All other great benefits they mentioned are also great, but the above should be the number one reason why you should care.


"I guess I just can't see how someone would say "no" to this poll unless they were thinking of it as a distraction from development of another feature. Who *wouldn't* want it to support another format if it was a freebie?"

yn0t_: why don't you ask the 16 people who voted against it?

yn0t_: why don't you ask the 16 people who voted against it?

Because, as I said earlier, I believe that they only answered that way because they feel that Vorbis support would just take away from the Empeg team's already reduced capacity to provide other enhancements, not to mention crucial bugs such as the random lockups that are happening in the 2.0 betas. This is a real bad time to ask about new features, especially ones that don't necessarily add anything new... Vorbis is a new format but in the end it's just replacing a format that works for most people already.

I didn't vote in this poll incidentally but I am also of the opinion that their time is better spent on other stuff. If there was nothing else to do, then Vorbis support would be great, in the off chance that MP3 starts to die out due to patent suits or whatever. But I don't see that happening. The genie is already out of the bottle, Fraunhofer can shut down LAME or whoever else, but they can't take away the encoders and players that already exist... What a shame...

yn0t_: why don't you ask the 16 people who voted against it?

I voted against it. Reason: I know it's out of the Cambridge team's hands. Even if they wanted to implement Vorbis support, there's nothing they can do about it at this time. There is no integer ARM implementation available for them to port to the player.

They may not be able to take away the products that have already been sold, but it is entirely possible that they could start severely limiting all new commercial implementations, including software updates, and forcing any free software underground.

For an example of what heavily patented algorithms and implementations can accomplish, take a look at this thread dealing with how ATI feels they must seriously cripple the hi-def output of their video cards in order for them and their VARs to maintain compliance with the terms of the DVD consortium's contract terms:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=107908

It is a long thread and ATI doesn't show up and make their comments until 10-20 messages into it, but what they do have to say is really scary. It boils down to anyone who wants to make hardware or software or wants to sell hardware or software that allows DVD playback must not allow DVD playback to a television to exceed a resolution of 720x480. That is a severe (and stupid) limitation, particularly for those on AVS forum who are used to using their computers to scale DVD video up to 1600x1200 and beyond for their high-def televisions and projectors.

If Fraunhofer wanted to, they could probably force all commercial products that support MP3 playback to require some sort of hokey copy prevention scheme or something as equally debilitating as part of the licensing terms for the MP3 patents. You may think it unlikely, but we have the case of Unisys really screwing over the companies that used the GIF image format as proof that this kind of about-face has been successfully pulled off before, and you can plainly see from the avsforum thread that the motivation for those kinds of restrictions already exists in the entertainment industry.

I would much rather have Oog widely deployed before such measures are ever implemented than be pushed into at the whim of Fraunhofer and the copyright industry.

If you read the thread you linked carefully you will see that the example does not fit with what is being discussed here.

It isn't a question of a patent holder making an enforcement in this case, it's a matter of the content rights holders making a decision to protect their copyright. They don't want the Macrovision protection defeated obviously.

And as Stephen Orr pointed out, this has nothing to do with ATI. You will not find analog output on any DVD product (computer or consumer electronic stand-alone) outputting higher than 480p.

Just don't tell anyone our previous Macintosh cards were doing 1024x768 TV-out with full-screen DVD. Of course the DVD application in that scenario is Apple's and it's their business to make sure such restrictions are adhered to.

BTW, I voted NO of Ogg Vorvis support. Mainly because it doesn't exist. And because people might confuse it with Ogg Vorbis. Which I also think the team shouldn't waste any time with unless they also planned to add it to one of their other products.

Bruno

Everything you said is valid (interesting discussion thread, BTW, though not surprising.) I just think we have different levels of paranoia. While I'm not naive enough to think that Fraunhofer will let LAME and others roll willy-nilly over their patents, I don't think that the MP3 format will be disappearing anytime soon enough for me to care about getting a replacement on my Empeg, and if it does, we'll have enough warning that Ogg could be worked in.

And as has been said many times, this is somewhat moot because it's out of their hands right now.

hybrid8 you misunderstood my point and actually reiterated it yourself when you said that the restriction applies to ALL DVD PLAYERS. Because of the patent issues involved with DVD, if you want to license the patents you have to agree to those ridiculous macrovision restrictions - you can't legally get one without the other. The exact same kind of "package deal" requiring mandatory restrictions on mp3 encoders and decoders could conceivably happen if Fraunhofer wanted to flex its muscles.

As for not voting for ogg because it "doesn't exist" - that's a catch-22. The empeg didn't exist either until the guys created it. Coming up with an integer implementation is just a matter of somebody with the right skills sitting down and writing it. In fact, it does exist, in at least one implementation, it just isn't free. If SB were to license that integer implementation for all of their rio devices we would probably be able to get it essentially for "free" on the empeg.

Another way to look at it is if ogg is widely implemented, Fraunhofer will lose what leverage they now have wrt to MP3. If an alternative technology is widely and freely available, then Fraunhofer would know that should they try to pull some draconian stunt, the whole world would switch over in a hearbeat. Think of it as insurance to keep Fraunhofer from making trouble. It's not like MS's super-monopoly hold on WMA is going to do much in the way of deterrence either.

Actually, I think he was mostly making fun of the misspelling in the title. Not that your points aren't valid, nonetheless.

The DVD issue goes farther than just using patents. That was my point.

And Bitt was correct about the other part. What is Ogg VorVis? When people can't even get the codec correct in a poll, then why bother?

Tell you what. You make an ARM decoder or contract someone to make it. Then send it to the empeg guys.

I think people are forgetting that the Riocar/empeg is a defunct retail product. Ogg support would have to be something that was within a marketing requirement document for a new/current retail or OEM product to warrant wasting much time on it, IMO.

BTW, Fraunhoffer and Thomson are out making money. Same as companies like SB. If a company realizes that paying to have MP3 technology is going to allow them to make more money than supporting only an "open" codec, then guess what? Time to pay the royalties.

I'd rather pay out a fee and sell a product, than to implement a freebie decoder no one is going to need/want.

Since the decoder is open, go to it. Don't wait around for the empeg guys to put it in place.

Bruno

Am I the only one who doesn't think Intellectual Property is evil?

Actually, it might be reasonable to make the case that the coupling of macrovision with the dvd patent technology is illegal. I am too lazy now to look up the specific wording, but there is something about in return for receiving a patent, the patent-holder must then make the patented technology available at a reasonable cost. One might argue that requiring macrovision is unreasonable.

>Am I the only one who doesn't think Intellectual Property is evil?

That's pretty funny. You do understand that if Fraunhofer's patents weren't beeing violated all over the place, that mp3 audio would not be the phenomenon that it is today. The most effective and accurate mp3 encoder, lame, is itself in violation of those patents. WinAmp was too, until AOL bought them and they paid Fraunhofer's license fees.

IP, especially in the form of software patents can be, and is often today, abused in a fashion that is decdidly anti-competitive. The whole freaking music industry is an oligarchy of 5 colluding companies that maintain their control over the market by abusing IP rights. Even Judge Patel, the judge who presides over the napster trial and was so keenly pro-copyright industry has figured things out and is now requiring that the RIAA prove that they legitimately own the copyrights to all the music that they claim. There is a reasonable chance that the RIAA will fail to win that argument too (they'll probably just bribe some congressmen to write a law that fixes things up though).

Not that I believe all IP rights are bad, just that the laws today which were written by the industry itself and rubber-stamped by the governments are far too biased in favor of delinquent corporate interests and against that of consumers and people in general.

A "DVD" doesn't require Macrovision (which I'm sure you know). There are many things that are lumped to create the DVD experience. It is up to the producer of any given disc to outfit their product with Macrovision. However... A DVD playback device must support Macrovision to be a legal product (with legal keys). If a disc is protected, it is not allowed to circumvent or disable that protection. In the case of Macrovision, I believe the point is that it has a limitation of 480p. Allowing an HD signal would disable the Macrovision protection by its nature. Anyway, tha analogy of DVD to MP3 isn't quite an apples to apples example. There are enough differences to make the comparison rather pointless.

With regards to LAME violating the Fraunhoffer patent, I'd have to read it to be able to tell you, so I'd have to take your word for it. Depending on their patent, other encoders could also be covered. Someone could have patented the entire concept and screwed everyone long ago.

Anyway, this patent finger-pointing still doesn't do anything to further the cause of Vorbis support. As I said, it's worth paying a licence if it's what your customers want. Advertising "MP3" will sell products. Advertising "Ogg Vorbis" will occupy shelf space.

Bruno

there is something about in return for receiving a patent, the patent-holder must then make the patented technology available at a reasonable cost.

If only. (I think you're confusing patents in general, with the W3C's abortive attempt to define "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing.)

The holder of a patent has absolute rights over it for the duration of the patent. The "return" is that the holder must disclose everything up front about how the patent works, so that once the patent expires anyone can duplicate the work.

Obviously this "return" is only worth anything if the invention described in the patent is still useful once the patent has expired; in other words, if the duration of the patent is shorter than the expected life of the technology.

ObOnTopic: I think it's fair to say that if an integer-only or ARM version of the Ogg Vorbis codec were released, there would be an internal development version incorporating it within 24 hours.

Peter

> Anyway, tha analogy of DVD to MP3 isn't quite an apples to apples example.

So you keep saying and so I keep disputing and I think it is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. It is all about how patents on DVD technologies force manufacturers to agree to restrictions outside of what is covered by the patents in order to gain access to those patents to the detrimant of the consumer. Fraunhofer's exceptionally broad patents on MP3 technologies could easily be used to cause all commercially sold MP3 products to contain restrictions that are detrimantal to consumers too. It doesn't matter that a DVD can have the macrovision optionally set - it is the fact that you can't buy a licensed player that ignores the bit regardless of its setting that is the relevant detail in the comparison with DVDs.

As for LAME - you ought to take a listen to what Franhofer has been saying for the last 7+ years - they claim their patents cover any encoding to MP3 format, basically if you output an MP3 you've used their patented algorithms, no matter how you got there. So, any unlicensed encoders are in violation. Fraunhofer makes similar claims for MP3 decoders, but more experienced people than I tend to think those claims are far weaker than the ones on for encoding. Nevertheless, I expect that SB pays royalties to Fraunhofer for the decoder in the empeg - I suspect they use a package of routines provided by ARM that includes the royalties in the purchase price.

> Advertising "Ogg Vorbis" will occupy shelf space.

Chicken-or-the-egg. I think I've made it pretty clear how support for vorbis across the entire rio line would be a long-term profitable benefit to SB.

In reply to:

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Who *wouldn't* want it to support another format if it was a freebie?

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What's a "freebie"? As Doug Burnside would have us know, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. "Freebie" to me means at least

• No payment (obviously)
• No development effort needed
• No bugs that might break anything else
• No memory footprint eating our precious RAM
• No extra initialisation time

AFAIAC, it would be nice to be able to remove WAV and WMA support from the player to make it leaner and fitter. Until such time as I might have a use for them, of course.

Uh, I was kinda saying just that... There are no freebies. Did you miss the context of my post, or were you just expanding on my original point?

I think you have to do a lot more reading about DVD licencing if you think the comparison is apple to apple. You seem to be adding in a lot of your own "ifs" which make it very obvious that you're trying to paint the orange red.

Your example would be akin to comparing MPEG2 to MP3. Codec to codec. "DVD" licencing is not solely MPEG2 however. If you want to do MPEG2 only, then you can still access the data off a DVD, but you're not going to be playing most copyrighted material. Most of the sticky bits of DVD are in there because of the studios. Without the studios there wouldn't be any content, so it wouldn't matter either way.

The Chicken and Egg thing doesn't comlpetely fly. The benefits must be enough to make the choice. And I suppose you think that people producing content, content players and other content-manipulation applications don't make these evaluations?

The biggest threat to MP3 is rapid scaling of storage capacity and communication bandwidth. Non-lossy compressed formats. Multi-channel support in an encoder would also be a future threat (and I understand Vorbis has support for this), BUT, it will wait on the content to become available in the first place. In current installations (and material) it's only suited for (home) theatre usage.

Obviously SB do not feel it is within their interests to include Vorbis if they have to develop it themselves. I don't blame them. It's completely useless for the large majority of their current and future customer base. Now, if it was just a matter of grabbing existing, open code, that's another story. Still some development, but a much more appealing proposition. Still not free, but as close as you're going to get.

Now, since I feel like this topic has been discussed to death and since Peter has given fair words to describe their position, can we let this issue die?

Do you want a practical example? GIF.

Bruno

I wasn't sure whether we agreed or not...

Certainly, the poll was poorly-worded, in that it did suggest that Vorbis support would be free. You only mentioned one of the hidden costs (and I thought you meant that that could be the only possible reason for a "no" vote); I thought I'd add a few more that occurred to me (including the ones that made me vote against).

KaCHING!

http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/0125.html

That looks really promising. Could you e-mail that to the guys?

Woo-Hoo!!!

BTW, it looks like the URL changed to here, as noted in this thread.

The chicken or the ogg? Well, that answers that!

I know that ogg support is a resource/priority issue, but this is great news. My tip of the hat to Biit Faulk for his "why we should care" overview earlier in this thread. While the priority of adding ogg support over other things is perhaps still debatable, this bit of news is enough to prompt me to add Ogg support on my ripper/encoder box and start working with it.

Certainly, the poll was poorly-worded, in that it did suggest that Vorbis support would be free.
Umm i never claimed in my poll that Vorbis would be free.

Glad that there is a integer based encoder for the developers to play with out there..
An implementation doesn't sound so far fetchted anymore.

No one said it was far fetched, we said it didn't exist. Now it does. You look like a wise prophet now... So, please, can you post a poll asking people if they want (a) a cross-fading feature, (b) true gapless output and (c) voice recognition... You're batting 1.000 so far!

Cross-fading! My gapless songs are close enough to completely gapless right now. And what on earth would I do with voice recognition? How would it ever be able to hear my voice over the very loud music? Besides, I'd have to stop signing to give voice commands. Though voice recognition for searching would be kind-a-cool.

Na, cross-fading is the ticket.

Bruno

Cross Fading 100% !

Are you all sure that Ogg Vorbis isn't just a character from Star Wars??

Ok, this marks the second funny post you've made. You've got hope yet.

Bruno

How would it ever be able to hear my voice over the very loud music?

That one's easy.

For voice recognition to work, there has to be a method of putting the player into vr mode, probably a remote button press. This would either mute or hush the player and prepare it to accept voice input.

tanstaafl.

This is my number one wish - not because I actually need it, I'm quite happy on a fully random play everything mode, but because it would just be very cool (in a geeky kind of way) to say "Set Playlist All Pantera. Append All Vivaldi. Append All Blues Playlist. Make It So."

Mmmm - warms the cockles of my gadget-boy heart

Mmmm - warms the cockles of my gadget-boy heart

And as everyone knows, there's nothing worse than a heart full of cold cockles!

tanstaafl.