Ogg

OGG is also the abbreviated title of the British mockumentary Operation Good Guys

The Ogg bitstream format—spearheaded by the Xiph.org Foundation—has been created as the framework of a larger initiative aimed at developing a set of components for the coding and decoding of multimedia content which are both freely available and freely re-implementable in software. The Ogg bitstream is defined in RFC 3533 and its MIME media type (application/ogg) in RFC 3534.

Various components of the project are intended to stand as alternatives to proprietary codecs such as:

MP3 and MPEG
RealAudio and RealVideo
QuickTime streaming format and its codecs
The RIFF format and its derivates such as WAV and AVI and their respective codecs
The Advanced Streaming Format with its Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video codecs

The principal Ogg component to date is Vorbis, for audio data. Other components include Theora, for video data; Speex, for voice data; and FLAC, for high-fidelity audio data.

It is often assumed that the name "Ogg" comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Rather, it is jargon that arose in the computer game Netrek, originally meaning a kamikaze attack, and later, more generally, to do something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources—at its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time.

Ogg codecs

Audio codecs
- lossy
  - Speex: handles voice data at low bitrates (~8-32 kbit/s/channel)
  - Vorbis: handles general audio data at mid- to high-level bitrates (~32-256 kbit/s/channel)
- lossless
  - Squish: handles archival and high fidelity audio data; Ogg's original codec
  - FLAC: handles archival and high fidelity audio data
Video codecs
- Theora: based upon On2's VP3 adapted to the Ogg framework, multiplexed with Vorbis-encoded audio channels
- Tarkin: an experimental codec utilizing 3D wavelet transforms

Ogg

Ogg codecs

External links