[Xiph-Advocacy] Will Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and FLAC become free and open standards soon?

[Jack Moffitt]

> According to Slashdot, Google try to get VP8 standardized via IETF.
> According to Monty, IETF did not want to standardize codecs, so I was
> a bit surprised by this.

Monty and I originally tried to get other standards organizations
interested in Ogg Vorbis, but no one wanted to touch it. We thought
we'd have luck with the W3C since they had previously standardized
PNG, but I remember being told that they considered it a failure to
some degree.  The IETF wasn't interested at all, with the reasoning
that there weren't enough codec experts involved to make it
worthwhile.

I managed to present a draft about Vorbis over RTP, which wasn't well
received at the time. I ended up getting discouraged and letting it
expire.

Silvia eventually got an information RFC published, documenting the
Ogg container, as well as another RFC documenting the various media
types. This was a far cry from IETF standardization, but at least it
was something.

When this came up again (nearly a decade later), there was enough
interest in the IETF to push forward, and it was clear at the BOF
meetings that lots of codec experts were indeed present within the
IETF ranks. There is now a codec working group at the IETF that is
trying to standardized a royalty-free codec for interactive audio
applications.

Of course, now that the IETF is working on one codec, it is not a huge
stretch to imagine them expanding in this area. I personally think it
is wonderful, and it is something they could have done a decade sooner
:)

jack.