Ogg Vorbis (thing)

Ogg Vorbis's name comprises the name of the File format (ogg) and the name of the stream format (vorbis for audio). The Ogg file format will soon (or not-so-soon, depending on how many developers this node attracts) feature support for:

• Bitrate peeling
• stream interweaving
• Ogg Tarkin - the video codec
• MIDI streams inna ogg
• Motion JPEG streams inna ogg

Right now, ogg vorbis has these advantages over mp3:

• A tagging system that is both well-thought out and extensible.
• Support for concatenation of two streams without clicks or noise in between them.
• Better audio quality at lower bitrates

Also, as ogg vorbis is in development, many of the drawbacks Lethal criticised above are no longer valid. The 1.0 Release Candidate 2 of the vorbis codec features (among other good things):

• compatibility with (soon to be released) 1.0 codebooks
• (optionally lossless or psychoacoustic) joint- stereo
• better audio quality at lower bitrates (mono files encode nicely to bitrates at about 40-64kbit/s)

Plug-ins for just about any architecture and audio player are available - Even for QuickTime and for DirectShow (which enables Windows Media Player to play ogg vorbis files).
The ogg vorbis home page can be found at
http://www.vorbis.com

Sources:

• http://www.vorbis.com
• about half a year of reading vorbis@ and vorbis-dev@xiph.org
• http://www.xiph.org