[Advocacy] persuading mobile phone manufacturers to implement Vorbis support

Alexander van Loon svloon at xs4all.nl
Sun May 6 02:55:35 PDT 2007


Hello,

Currently my Motorola RAZR V3i phone doesn't play Ogg Vorbis AFAIK, and
Nokia phones don't play it either. I thought this was strange given
Nokia's involvement in open source (their N770 and N800 devices). I
contacted their customer service and asked why there is no Vorbis
support in their phones. They guy at the helpdesk said he didn't know
the Vorbis codec and said it wasn't in the planning for being
implemented, but he told me he'd communicate my feedback.

I know that you can play Vorbis on Nokia phones with third-party
software like this -
http://developer.symbian.com/main/tools/appcode/cpp/ogg_vorbis.jsp - and
this - http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/ - but this is not as good
as being able to play Vorbis files out-of-the-box on phones.

So far I don't know about any phone which can play Vorbis. There are a
lot more media players which can play Vorbis, such as those from iriver
and Cowon, yet the more popular media players like those from Creative
and Apple can't.

If it's possible to play Vorbis with third-party software on Nokia
phones, what's holding Nokia back to implement it themselves so it works
out of the box? AFAIK Vorbis is not patent-encumbered, there are no
license fees, it's 100% free to implement. What could be preventing
manufacturers to implement it?

My final question is, does the Xiph.Org Foundation actively try to
persuade mobile phone/media player manufacturers to implement Ogg Vorbis
support out-of-the-box in their devices?

Greetings,
Alexander van Loon



More information about the Advocacy mailing list