[vorbis] RC2 on slashdot.org

[John Morton]

On Tuesday 14 August 2001 15:07, you wrote:
>  On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 02:45:45PM +1200, John Morton wrote:
>  > ... The png thing will disappear
>  > once 80% of sound software supports it out of the box, which is just
>  > about the case now.
>
>  Last I checked, IE4+ accounted for 80+% of the web browser market.  Also
>  last I checked, IE4+ supported enough of the PNG standard to make it
>  as useful as GIF (indexed palette PNGs and 1 bit transparency). PhotoShop,
>  Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP support PNG out of the box, and I bet that
>  accounts for 80+% of the image manipulation/creation market.
>
>  The "PNG thing" hasn't stopped plaguing PNG yet, and unfortunately it
>  won't stop be used against Ogg any time soon either, I bet.

The only working feature PNG started out with that GIF didn't have was 
support for greater than 8 bit colour, and that didn't matter to much back in 
'95 as most people didn't run at higher display depths. Since then it's been 
consistantly behind GIF on having the working features the web cared about - 
inline images, transparency, animation. Even when it had them, they were 
pretty dodge; images rendered with different paletes on different browser, 
transparency only worked on some browsers on some platforms, and there 
_still_ isn't animation support worth a damn on the browsers people use. 

Ogg just doesn't suffer these problems. The reference library will play 
anything produced by any of the encoders. The only difference between RC1 and 
final will be a few bug fixes. The libraries are a joy to use and BSD 
liscened, so that building plugins is a breeze. There are already plugins for 
just about every player that matters and if it's not distributed with the 
player, just download the plugin from vorbis.com. The only question on the 
client side is how long will it take for the hardware players to reach the 
market. 

John

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