Timwi wrote: I've personally never actually seen a Vorbis-encoded file anywhere except Wikipedia, and non-techies I know typically don't know what to do with them when I send them, especially since apparently they don't play in the installations of Winamp many people have (I don't use Windows, so have no idea if more recent versions of Winamp include a Vorbis codec in the default download package). Basically everyone still uses mp3, with AAC second place, and I've even seen more MPC than Vorbis, though that may not be representatives (codec-elitists tend to like MPC for being a subband, rather than transform, codec, which apparently makes pre-echo artifacts like those you find in MPC/AAC/Vorbis much less of a problem). At the very least I think we should wait until a reasonably functional player is available for all major operating systems, so even if people can't play them by default, they can go somewhere and acquire software to play them. Even more preferable would be to have reasonably functional encoders available for all major OSes as well, so people could actually contribute the videos. (Vorbis does meet both these criteria.) -Mark

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:33:44AM +0100, Timwi wrote: No it hasn't. It is almost unheard of outside the linux world. Still, I support an open format for music/videos. The effort required to get an ogg plugin for your favorite player is small enough that even if someone hasn't heard of ogg before it shouldn't be a big deal. Arvind -- Its all GNU to me

Peter Gervai wrote: That's a damned arrogant attitude. In some parts of the world people would count themselves lucky just to have text available on a slow connection. I support the vision of making information available in these places, so a lot of this fancy stuff needs to be severable. Ec

Peter Gervai wrote: Sorry if my response was too strong, and thanks for the clarification. Ec

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 02:16:35 +0100, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote: I will note that many informal web broadcasting groups (Internet radio, some stations more legitimate and concerned about copyrights than others) adore Ogg Vorbis for its superior quality at the same or similar bitrates.

Thomas Jost wrote: Is XviD legal in the US? My understanding is that it's an MPEG-4 codec, and that there are patents covering fundamental parts of that standard. [IANAL] Surprisingly, this isn't mentioned in the FAQ though talk about it appears in their devel list archives. I think we'd want some clarification on this before declaring our support for it. This little note raises all kinds of alarms: "Distributing XviD is allowed and it is encouraged by the fact it is published under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2. But, here at xvid.org, we don't distribute binaries for legal reasons." http://www.xvid.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&a… The patent issue which makes it difficult to support with free software; this is the same reason we recommend Vorbis instead of MP3. I suspect it's premature to distribute anything with Theora at this time, but it's worth looking at. We're in this for the long term, and videos can always be recoded from the original source material. [Of course that's the thorny issue with video: the original source material is *huge*.] -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)