

Monty - In Defense of Ogg's Good Name - _delirium
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html

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_delirium
Thought it was worth posting Monty's response, since the original anti-Ogg
piece got a lot of discussion here a few months ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164161>

~~~
mmastrac
Monty's response is well-thought-out and well-supported. I was hoping to see
the other side of the argument when this came out before, thanks.

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blasdel
He does a very good job of bringing the nerd rage but unfortunately reality
doesn't back him up — even his own implementation doesn't support his design
choices very well and the ones in larger systems basically ignore them.

~~~
oconnor0
How so?

~~~
blasdel
Seeking is frequently broken, especially wherever OGG support has been added
to a larger system as a plugin like with Quicktime or ffdshow. FLAC is much
worse on this.

You can't actually use any non-Xiph codecs in an OGG container in the real
world (except through the OGM hack that they repudiate), because they don't
document any of it and nobody tests against it. You won't even get sensible
errors. It's worse if they implement OGG support by just linking with
liboggplay (the path of least resistance), so the container is implemented
separately bundled with only its own codecs.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
_You can't actually use any non-Xiph codecs in an Ogg container in the real
world [...] because they don't document any of it_

He covers this in the article. If you want to say the the documentation is
lacking, just say that, and they'll explain that they don't want to encourage
mixing of open and non-open codecs. If you want to focus on the _can't
actually use non-Xiph codecs in an OGG container_ side, then you'd have to
explain how Dirac and Flac managed to be put in the container without any
change to Ogg.

One is a (unfounded?) criticism of the technology or API of Ogg, the other is
criticism of a Xiph policy decision to promote open codecs. Don't just throw
stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Also, if seeking is broken in Quicktime for both Ogg and Flac, two containers
with very different approaches, maybe blaming Ogg is illogical? There's no
obvious reason to even mention Flac as, despite coming under the Xiph umbrella
once it was a popular free codec, it was developed independently.

~~~
blasdel
My point was not that using alternate codecs was technically impossible, but
that it was _de facto_ infeasible — nobody does it (because you'd only want to
use it if you already wanted to use a free codec for it's freedom), as such
nobody tests against it, so it won't be well supported by implementations, not
even to necessarily give you a 'codec not found' error message.

You're right that OGG and native Flac are different containers, with
differently stupid approaches (aiming too high and too low, respectively). The
later Flac formats do specify OGG's broken metadata system, one of several
reasons that nobody ever distributes Flac files with any internal metadata.
I've never seen a Flac-in-OGG file in the wild, but I imagine that seeking is
at least as broken there.

Seeking in Quicktime works just fine for all manner of esoteric codecs and
containers — the problem is with the FOSS stuff where they decided that they'd
do something inventive, and ended up with something pointlessly different —
enough to make it annoying to integrate into any existing system — and no
better than what everyone else does.

Sometimes what scratches your own itch and is fun to implement is no good for
anyone else to actually use.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
_Quicktime works just fine for all manner of esoteric codecs and containers —
the problem is with the FOSS stuff where they decided that they'd do something
inventive, and ended up with something pointlessly different_

So it works with _all manner of esoteric_ stuff as long as it's not
_inventive_ , or _different_? That's a very limited definition of _esoteric_.
And I've heard enough complaining about Quicktime over the years to not
automatically give it the benefit of the doubt.

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akkartik
Sentence-by-sentence rebuttals are not very effective. And they're _never_ the
best you can do. Why are you wasting my time nitpicking on 'legend tells us'?
It's silly to tell me I needn't bother with the original - and then take me in
excruciating detail through it.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's not explicit in the original or explained well in this rebuttal but the
"legend tells us" is basically a way for the original author to call the
current author a liar without actually coming out and saying so.

The line after that phrase is about Ogg being designed for Video codecs,
something he clearly doesn't believe as later in the same document he suggests
it was originally only intended for Vorbis audio.

See footnote 26 and the section that references it in the Monty document for a
counter to this popular misconception.

~~~
akkartik
Thanks for replying amidst the downvotes.

You're right that those points are valid (as are the rest). Nits don't happen
because some people like to dawdle. They happen because there's a lot of valid
points to make. Which makes it particularly important to spend time finding
the right ordering for them!

(and to prune the ones that don't flow. Which would you prefer, that 10% read
everything or that 75% read the 10 most important points you want to make?)

