Mozilla offers grant to develop Ogg
The Mozilla Foundation has put its money where its mouth is, with a $100,000 grant designed to improve the Ogg Theora and Vorbis media formats.
Reported over on Ars Technica yesterday, the grant will be used to fund development in the Ogg container format and the two main media codecs used therein: the Theora video codec and the Vorbis audio codec.
Unlike alternative codecs – such as AAC or MP4 – the Theora and Vorbis technologies require no licensing fees or royalty payments, making them an excellent choice for open source projects such as Wikimedia and Mozilla. The format also has no integral Digital Rights Management technology, which helps adoption in a world that is increasingly turning its back on locked-down media formats.
The $100,000 grant isn't merely a gift from the Mozilla Foundation, however: there's a lot for the Foundation to gain from improved media codecs. Firefox 3.1 is due to have integral support for Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio with no plugins required, and for that to work the base code behind Ogg needs a thorough checking over and tidy up – which the grant will certainly make happen. It's not just Firefox looking to benefit, however: rival browser Opera is also planning to add Ogg support in upcoming versions, with a preview release already supporting the format.
Mike Shaver, the vice president of engineering at Mozilla, explained that the Foundation sees Theora as “the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the Internet,” but believes that “it can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation.” Hopefully the grant will go a long way towards seeing these improvements implemented – which will be a win for anyone who enjoys audio or video on the 'net.
Hoping to see Ogg take its place as the predominant format for media on the Internet, or should developers man-up and start paying the license fees required to use MP3 or Flash formats? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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I'm still glad that HTML 5 won't make it a requirement though, as not giving developers an 'open' choice with what formats to use would just be hypocritical. Still, I'd like to see Ogg get more popular as it should then encourage a bigger move to a DRM-free world and less dominated by proprietary standards (e.g. Flash, Java, Silverlight).
might well support flac later :D
i dont have that many songs in ogg yet but its a exellent audio codec that beats mp3 hands down
flac is heaven and got all my cds in it ;D
i wish also matoska will be supported, it supports steaming
http://www.matroska.org/
HTML5's video tag should allow for any kinds of formats and I would assume it's up to the browser maker to implement the video codec support where Ogg Vorbis/Theora is the required minimum.
Also people bashing on Flash,Silverlight and Java don't really know what they are doing. These technologies were created to fill a void on the web. Existing technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) can't offer multimedia in the same way. The Web is a patchwork of different technologies mixed together and I hope HTML5 with it's Video support at least can remove the need for Flash just for a simple thing as video. While Flash,Silverlight and Java will remain to be used for other multimedia content.
While I'm not really impressed by HTML5 (too little too late) it's a step in the right direction.
My Mp3 player does support Ogg. Now adays most mp3 players decode everything in very cheap dedicated hardware custom built for the file formats they support, hence some of them are simply not capable of playing unsupported formats. Strangely enough my mp3 player can play mp3, wmv and ogg but can't play wav files. Again it goes back to the hardware issue. Larger players or players that decode in software would have no problem supporting any and all formats.