On Saturday 24 February 2007, Bryan S. Tyson wrote: > I think not only MS, but OUR WHOLE SOCIETY should wake up and use ogg. When > will people decide enough is enough, we refuse to be held hostage by the > whims of arrogant patent holders?
What makes you so sure ogg is patent free? Ogg is only a container format. The actual music or video encoded by a codec will be stored inside an Ogg container. Ogg containers may contain streams encoded with multiple codecs, for example, an audio video file may contain data encoded by both an AUDIO codec and a VIDEO codec. Being a Container format, Ogg can embed audio and video in various formats (such as MPEG-4, Dirac, MP3 and others). Therefore, the actual algorithms used by the codecs encapsulated in ogg files may be found to violate patents. Your average music listener can't look at an ogg file and tell with certainty what patents might be violated by the codecs used inside. It hasn't, up to now, been worth anyone's time to go after off ogg because there is no one to sue, but as soon as any major manufacturer makes devices that play ogg you can bet it will attract lawyers like flies to dead fish. Because ogg is merely an encapsulation mechanism, implementers still have to support a multitude of codecs in order to be able to decode what might be hidden inside. Including mp3 formats. This raises costs, and does nothing to avoid entanglement in patent suits. Therefore ogg is expensive to implement in silicon, which is probably why you don't see it. Furthermore, because it is just a container, and an extensible one at that, there is no way to guarantee portability of ogg files to among devices. This means manufacturers are forever in an arms race to keep ahead of consumer expectations. The file says ogg, the consumer expects the device to play it, but what's inside the ogg file wasn't even invented when the device was made, or was excluded due to licensing. You should get in the habit of being a little more precise in what you wish for, Such as Ogg/Vorbis or Ogg/Speex. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen
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