EMI, Apple partner on DRM-free premium music

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AAC is licensed by the same people who do MP3

Namely, the MPEG group. Anything with MPEG in it (MP3 is MPEG 1 Layer 3 Audio, and AAC is MPEG 4 Advanced Audio Codec) has the onerous MPEG group licensing.

Ogg is the way to go. Ogg (note that it’s not an acronym, and so only has one capital letter) is a platform or container file format, like QuickTime .MOV files. It can contain tracks of various types. Vorbis is the Ogg “lossy” codec, which has quality and compression ratios at least equal to AAC, and in most tests slightly better (not that the average non-audiophile would be able to hear the difference). It is, to the best of my knowledge, the best lossy codec on any platform. Nothing else even matches, let alone exceeds, it.

Ogg can also take FLAC tracks. FLAC is a lossless codec. While some other lossless codecs may give slightly better compression, and some others may in some conditions decomress faster, FLAC is unique in having the same fast decompression speed regardless of the compression settings used, so it’s always predictable. This is very useful for real-time playback of FLAC files, and it means that hand-held devices using slow embedded chips can do it effectively. Lossless codecs still mean big files, though — the best they can get is still over ½ the size of the original uncompressed audio (e.g. an uncompressed .WAVe or .AIFF).

Speex is Ogg’s speech-oriented lossy codec. It provides by far the highest compression ratios, and does so while keeping the spoken human voice easily understandable. It’s not good for music, even a background music bed behind a human spoken-word speaker. But for what it is (namely, for telephony applications, in-game voice chatting [which needs the bandwidth used by chat to be as low as possible so as not to cause the game to drop or delay game-info packets, resulting in increased lag], etc.), it’s awesome.

Theora is Ogg’s video codec. I don’t know how it compares to H.264 (an MPEG4 codec, and so likewise burdened with the MPEG group’s onerous licensing) or On2’s VP7 (which is proprietary but has less onerous licensing than H.264, and supposedly is better quality than H.264 though I find that hard to believe because H.264 is quite frankly awesome, beating the pants off of any Windows Media video codec, or even the vaunted Sorenson 3 and Sorenson Spark codecs, and about twice as good as the earlier H.263 which itself beats anything Real or Windows Media have to offer). Anyone know of any good comparisons of Ogg Theora with the other codecs? It would be great to have a patent-free video codec that can at least hold its own with H.263 or On2 VP6 or Sorenson 3, if not H.264 or On2 VP7.

(Mods, please delete earlier mal-formatted version.)

Posted by: Joel R   Posted on: 04/02/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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