[vorbis] Format comparison

[Craig Dickson]

Firelight Multimedia wrote:

> Ok I didn't know about the closed vs open thing, I just meant that the
> best technology doesn't always win, beta was supposedly better..

Not entirely, actually. In the early days, Beta was limited to 60
minutes per tape, or something like that, so you couldn't fit an entire
2-hour movie onto one cassette. One of VHS's big selling points at first
was that you could have 120 minutes per tape. Of course, Sony improved
Beta's running time not long thereafter, but by then VHS already had its
foot in the door. Also, IIRC, VHS machines cost less than Beta, since
(a) they knew they were the underdogs and (b) several VHS makers were
competing with each other as well as with Sony.

I think these factors were of much greater importance than simply
"closed vs. open". The public couldn't care less about open, because
they don't want to build their own VCRs or MP3 players from parts. What
they care about most is basic functionality and price (which is affected
by openness, but it can be kind of subtle). VHS won on both grounds,
since most consumers considered it a pain to have to switch tapes in the
middle of a movie. (This was a problem for LaserDisc too, and surprise
surprise, it never took over the world either.)

So with this in mind, if one wants to draw a proper analogy between
VHS/Beta and Ogg/MP3, what basic functionality is MP3 missing that Ogg
provides?

The silence gap is the only thing I can think of. I'm not sure that's
important enough, but maybe I'm underestimating it.

Bitrate peeling is nice, but for the consumer to care about that,
portable MP3/Ogg players have to become a lot more popular than I think
they are (I live in Silicon Valley, the world epicenter of people who
buy cute tech toys they don't need, and I can't think of anyone I know
who owns a portable MP3 player), and the software for downloading files
to the player has to support peeling so that the user can choose any
high-bitrate Ogg file and have the program automatically peel it down to
128k or less as it downloads to the player.

Other than that, the differences between Ogg and MP3 are mostly not
"we can do this, they can't", but rather, "we can do it better", which
is a much less compelling argument to the consumer in the face of an
established standard.

Craig

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