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Vorbis: an open source and patent-free audio format
(Last updated: Jun. 16, 2000)

Vorbis is the first of a planned family of Ogg multimedia coding formats being developed as part of Xiphophorus's Ogg multimedia project. The following are excerpts from the Vorbis home page . . .

What is Vorbis?

Ogg Vorbis is a fully Open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.

Why Vorbis? MP3 is open.

No, it isn't. Fraunhofer (and other MPEG consortium members) claim that it is impossible to create an mp3 encoder without infringing on their patents. To create/use an encoder, the law says one must pay royalties to Fraunhofer and other MPEG Consortium members. In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante. MPEG-4, destined to be the next generation of internet audio, is even more tightly controlled.

Can Vorbis stream?

Yes. One can both encode and decode as a single pass, real-time stream. Vorbis is well suited to 'Internet Radio' and other forms of real-time and offline electronic distribution.

How fast is Vorbis?

Vorbis requires roughly the same encoding and decoding power as MP3. The current Vorbis source is immature (and therefore generally unoptimized) so it will also get faster as time goes on.

Does Vorbis support low bitrate encoding?

Vorbis is also intended for extreme low bitrates, but that functionality does not yet exist in the current CVS source. On paper, the math says Vorbis should scale to low bitrates much more gracefully, but we've not yet actually written the code. Low bitrate coding is a high priority, so we'll know the details of low bitrate performance soon.

What extension does a Vorbis file use?

Ogg Vorbis uses the Ogg bistream format, and the correct extension is .ogg

How does Vorbis compare to MP3?

Vorbis is currently too immature to evaluate authoritatively against MP3. Right now, it's about as good in the 128-160 kbps range; the encoder used to produce these streams is a test encoder intended to produce bitstreams only for code stability testing purposes and illustrate the minimum amount of code needed to produce a valid bitstream. It produces perfectly valid bitstreams, but has virtually no features you'd expect to see in a production encoder. A production command line encoder is in progress.

What are Vorbis's distribution terms?

Anyone may freely use and distribute the OggSquish and Vorbis specification, whether in a private, public or corporate capacity. The specification is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose. However, Xiphophorus and the Ogg project (www.xiph.org) reserve the right to set the Ogg/Vorbis specification and certify specification compliance. (See the Vorbis website for complete details.)


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