[vorbis-dev] Formats other than Vorbis in Ogg

[Michael Smith]

>What formats does Ogg intend to support?  I know that there's work on 
>Ogg Tarkin going on.  But what about putting a plain wave file into the 
>Ogg framework?  Or, even better, ressurecting Ogg Squish.  Many people, 
>when posting audio samples, include the Vorbis file (of course) and then 
>a wave file.  Then other users tell them to put into flac format, to 
>save space.  Why couldn't flac be integrated into Ogg?  Since Ogg Squish 
>is dead, what about Ogg Flac?  In fact, i seem to remember rumblings 
>about this a long time ago.

The long term goal is for ogg to be a generic media container format in
the same way as riff (avi/wav), qt, and so on are. Except better, 
hopefully ;-)

In the short term, vorbis is already supported, and Jack just recently
finished his vorbis+midi work. One or more video formats will be supported
at some point. Various people want to get MNG support done soon, tarkin
will hopefully be a reality at some point, and several people have 
suggested putting on2's vp3 codec into ogg, though nobody has started doing
so that I know of. 

There are specific plans to resurrect Squish after vorbis 1.0 is done, and
make it work in ogg. Doing something similar with flac would also be possible,
I suppose.

>
> From what I understand, most of the work right now with Vorbis is going 
>into fine tuning the lossy compression codec so that it sounds the best 
>it can.  All the bitstream formatting and fucntional details are pretty 
>much solid and in a production state.  Doesn't this mean that a working 
>product, like flac, could be integrated into the Ogg framework without 
>too much trouble?

Yes, but you need player support too, and so on. It's not trivial, but it
isn't that hard either.

>
>I think this would be a good idea, and pretty cool, too.  It would unify 
>the tools and players.  For example, in Winamp or XMMS, you'd only need 
>an Ogg plugin to play back wav's, flac's, vorbis's, midi's.  And you'd 
>only need one encoder to do this as well.  In Grip (or some other tool) 
>you'd just pass a '-flac' switch and you'd have lossless instead of 
>lossy Ogg audio files.  Not to mention you could tag these files in the 
>same way that you can tag Vorbis files, which is pretty useful in 
>itself.  (this can be done, right?)

Vorbis's tag system is part of the vorbis format, not part of the ogg
format. However, it's reasonable to assume that codecs used in ogg will
support a similar or identical system, if we have control of the format.

Michael

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