skullbochs

MPEG-1 Layer 3 (Mp3) audio has not yet been succeeded. Both Apple and Microsoft have been pushing their own newfangled proprietary codecs, but they’re just not sufficiently better for most people to care. Increasing storage and bandwidth have lessened the need for better lossy compression, while lack of widespread compatibility for any of the alternatives forces people to use Mp3 to ensure compatibility. Xiph’s Ogg Vorbis is in fourth-place, but has carved out a respectable niche for itself among GNU/Linux enthusiasts and video game developers.

What wrong with this picture is that, among the four codecs listed, Vorbis is the only one you don’t have to pay to use. The Mp3 format is restricted by a variety of software patents that won’t expire for several years yet. The early years of Mp3 were marred by controversy when many people who wrote implementations of the Mp3 format under the impression that it was royalty-free found themselves facing royalties. Because of this, many GNU/Linux distributions will not play Mp3 files out of the box. Users have to download additional software (usually illegally) to play the same files that will play on the cheap Mp3 player they got for Christmas.

Of course, most Windows and Mac users will never suffer this problem. It disproportionately affects users of free/open-source software because the nature of such software generally makes compliance with proprietary patent licenses nearly impossible in practice. Meanwhile Vorbis is caught in a catch-22: to get broad support, it needs many users; to get mroe users, it needs more widespread support. (Even so, I have to wonder why more audio software and devices don’t implement Vorbis — the format’s free, the implementation’s free, so it should cost very little to implement it anywhere.)

We have a chance to change this situation for the better. As web browsers move to adopt the draft HTML 5 standard, they’ll be picking up support for two new tags: <audio> and <video>. The idea behind these tags is to encourage browsers to implement native playback of audio and video files, without requiring bulky plugins like Adobe Flash. The Mozilla Foundation (makers of Firefox), Opera Software (makers of Opera) and Google (makers of Chrome) have all pledged to include support for Vorbis and it’s royalty-free cousin, the Theora video format.

The HTML 5 specifications originally required that all implementations of HTML 5 implement both Vorbis and Theora. This requirement was removed after an objection by Apple and Nokia (backing the proprietary MPEG-4 formats) for very flimsy reasons. Nevertheless, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are all going to implement Vorbis and Theora relatively soon.

This is an opportunity to move away from expensive and restriction-encumbered formats. Audio compression is good enough that most people will never notice the difference between an .mp3, an .ogg, and an .m4a; so why pay anything for the .mp3 or .m4a? And while Theora’s not in the same league as MPEG-4, it gets the job done. I personally plan to start moving away from other formats to Ogg, and to start hosting Vorbis and Theora embedded media here as soon as Firefox supports <audio> and <video>.

Also see the Free Software Foundation’s Play Ogg campaign. They keep a list of sites that are “ogg-friendly.”