It is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3 is still abundant.
I was especially annoyed when I still had an iPod, because substantial parts of my music library are in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which Apple could support without paying a single cent in licensing, yet iPod - at least a couple of years back - only supported MP3 and AAC. :-|
I would assume the patents on MP3 have expired by now, is anyone in a position to confirm or deny this?
> In the United States, the technology will be substantially patent-free on 31 December 2017 (see below). The majority of MP3 patents expired in the US between 2007 and 2015
(2)Term.—
Subject to the payment of fees under this title,
such grant shall be for a term beginning on the date
on which the patent issues and ending 20 years from
the date on which the application for the patent was
filed in the United States or, if the application
contains a specific reference to an earlier filed
application or applications under section 120, 121,
365(c), or 386(c), from the date on which the
earliest such application was filed.
(3)Priority.—
Priority under section 119, 365(a), 365(b), 386(a),
or 386(b) shall not be taken into account in
determining the term of a patent.
For this patent, there is a chain of specific references to earlier filed applications, but I'm not sure which of those, if any, are under section 120, 121, 365(c) or 386(c) and so affect the expiration date of the patent.
You simply don't need to be the best to win, you just need to be good enough. If your technic is good enough other soft factors are way more important.
Vorbis and FLAC may be distributed under very permissive open-source licenses, but they may also infringe on software patents, which is ostensibly why Apple has avoided them. They also may not, but under the current US patent system we can't really know until a court case; it does make sense for Apple (or any other company trying to avoid paying huge sums to patent trolls) not to test these waters. Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass the buck.
> Licensing AAC and MP3 from Fraunhofer was an easy way to pass the buck.
Not really. Someone else could pop up and claim to have a patent over AAC or MP3, just as easily as they could for any other codec. Licensing a patent from one party makes absolutely no guarantee that someone else couldn't pop up with another patent and either payment or destroy a product. And I seriously doubt that a patent license for AAC or MP3 came with indemnity against any third-party patent claim.
> but they may also infringe on software patents, which is ostensibly why Apple has avoided them.
No, it's not the reason. Anything can infringe on unknown patents, even same AAC. Opus and Vorbis aren't any more risky, Opus is actually much less. Apple are just jerks who don't want that barriers for entry (requirement to use patented codecs) would disappear.
It's an argument against being the first major company to ship something; Vorbis has had nobody sue any of the major companies who have been shipping it for over a decade. The longer other major companies have been shipping without being sued the more likely it is nobody else will surface.
The claim that apple avoided FLAC due to parents doesn't hold up. Apples ALAC implements all the same techniques and so is open to all the same patent threats.
At the time, Ogg Vorbis was difficult to hardware decode and its impact on the battery life was noticeable. Other decoders have been introduced since but I don't know if hardware decoding is here or not.
Tremor, the fixed-point decoder of Ogg Vorbis, came out in 2002. According to the Rockbox performance data, it requires about the same clock speed as AAC-LC. iPods and similar generally don't have fixed-function audio decoders. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison
Android reads Ogg and Flac natively. It is being used by Spotify, and in most games internally, especially indie games. Ogg didn't win, but not far from it either.
Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis for all its streams, I believe. But I guess that doesn't really count when it's heavily DRM encumbered and delivered by unfree software.
It also found a niche market in video games, where it's very common to this day (there's an outdated list on the xiph wiki [1]). Netflix also used it on the Wii when they didn't have a system decoder available [2].
Opus is not descended from Vorbis. It's descended from CELT and SILK. CELT was developed by Xiph.org, SILK by Skype. The CELT portion handles complex, arbitrary audio like music and sound effects. The SILK part handles voice.
Xiph, Skype, and IETF (among others IIRC) pooled their expertise in CELT, SILK, and the standards track respectively. Xiph.org did develop Vorbis though.
Some (Apple) staunchly refuse to support free codecs. They on purpose put blockers for wider adoption, so the above is not surprising.
I make it a point to buy music in FLAC, and then encode it in Opus for playback (that's why I try to avoid buying when FLAC / lossless is not available). But so far no store sells music in Opus optionally.
Since they made it themselves, they overlooked their usual negativity. But of course, they can't support FLAC (which was released in 2001) because NIH and because Apple.
Of course what? I don't get what you're trying to imply. Are you suggesting that inventing redundant incompatible codecs for the sake of it is de rigueur for Apple? Because I can't think of another example. As far as I can tell, the opposite is overwhelmingly true.
Apple has invented a handful of codecs and container formats in its time (I can think of MOV, ProRes, Pixlet and a few ancient/esoteric Quicktime codecs) but they all served a distinct purpose not sufficiently catered for by their contemporaries.
I'm willing to believe Apple when they say there was an engineering reason why they created ALAC. Perhaps an optimised implementation (not the reference implementation) may have offered some performance/battery life advantage on certain hardware. We don't know. And it doesn't matter much.
I thought Apple are notorious for NIH, and looking down at interoperability in general. I surely didn't notice that the opposite is almost always true.
Can you cite any examples of where Apple has eschewed standards or interoperability without a good technical reason? I suspect anything you list will be either:
• No interoperable standards were available at the time;
• Distinctly better than / more capable than contemporary interoperable standards;
• Maintaining a legacy decision made for one of the above reasons.
Yeah, I'm not using iTunes though. There is really no reason whatsoever not to provide lossless in digital form, especially since CDs did that for a long time in physical medium. Bandcamp always provides FLAC. That's where I buy music mostly.
It's decode only for some reason. For whatever reason sox and libsndfile won't touch it; ffmpeg won't encode it. And iOS and Android browsers won't play it. Shame because it's clearly the current winner.
Strangely absent across all mobile platforms at the moment. And even Firefox won't play it as .webm only .ogg. (Huh?) Man, why is audio always so wonky?
On Android, support for OPUS is mandatory for 5.0 and newer (by CTS). I would be surprised if the browsers would implement codecs by themselves, instead of passing the streams to the system for decoding.
I said "widely available." When distros bundle an ffmpeg encoder, it's widely available. When libsndfile and sox support it, the format migrates toward common use. "build ffmpeg" is a nonstarter for most mortals.
> It is interesting that 15 years later, with Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate, and Opus apparently even better, MP3 is still abundant.
MP3 requires far less memory to decode than Ogg Vorbis does. This was a big deal at the time as RAM cells added cost to the MP3 decoders.
Now, with CELT (which later became the Opus codec) this was not true. But it took a long time to get there.
There were some vague reasons behind it. Apple claimed it improves battery life for mobile devices (possibly because it is 'dumber') and it's based on the mp4 container format used by other Apple-preferred formats.
Using the same file extension for non-lossy and lossy music... ugh. If they wanted to sell DRM protected lossless files I'd even cut them some slack, but they didn't. This was just poorly thought out. Likewise both formats are trivial to decode; I'm not buying the power argument. The smaller .flac file likely wins anyway.
On a positive note, Apple later released a reference ALAC implementation under the Apache 2.0 license, which includes a patent grant, so the damage is mostly limited to consumer annoyance.
They could have stuck with the .mp4 extension, but they were attempting to reduce the potential for confusion. It's a file extension, once we embrace the fact that it is just a hint (and can be a lie), it doesn't really matter so much.
The MPEG-4 format was based on the QuickTime format, so it shouldn't be any surprise that Apple prefers to go with an MPEG-4 format even when an acceptable alternative is available. The reality is that Apple doesn't support very many alternatives to MPEG-4 formats, and they probably wouldn't support MP3 if it weren't for the fact that they wouldn't have been able to take a significant position in the market for digital media players without MP3 playback. The same will probably never be the case for Ogg or FLAC.
I'm aware of at least two (actual) MPEG-4 lossless formats (MPEG-4 ALS and MPEG-4 SLS). ALAC is just a random format worse than the existing one at the time, stuffed in a .m4a container. (Apparently .caf as well.)
MPEG-4 ALS and SLS were standardized after ALAC was released in OS X/QuickTime/iTunes, but yes, those are two more possibilities when you have an .mp4 or .m4a file, and the pile of other extensions they can use.
> Ogg Vorbis not only providing better audio quality at a given bitrate
That is not my experience at all. If I need to encode in a lossy format, LAME has always produced a smaller transparent encode than Vorbis. But if I've been bandwidth/space restricted, Vorbis and AAC have been better than MP3.
There is no excuse for MP3 in 2016. Like parents who eagerly took "baby's first step" photos with the first iPhone camera... oops. As technologists and influencers we should help migrate people forward. Ya hear me, SoundCloud?
Calling MP3 "transparent" even at 320kbps is such a far reach. Especially in treble and bass, lack in detail, etc. It's just a limitation to the codec. In comparison, AAC produces a much higher quality encodes, which somewhat approach a "transparent" lossy encode.
I have yet to see anyone being able to tell the me what sample was the mp3 with any consistency in an ABX test. I don't know how other encoders perform, but LAME is producing really really good results.
MP3 is used where simplicity and compatibility are prioritised - Ogg is neither simple nor widely compatible. Where quality is prioritised, there are other alternatives providing at least as good quality.
So asking "Why is Ogg not used over MP3 because quality" misses the point - MP3 wasn't chosen for premium quality, and Ogg is awful at the things MP3 is good at. Apple supports MP3 for compatibility/simplicity, AAC for quality (lossy), and ALAC for quality (lossless). I don't really see how Ogg competes on a technical level with any of those, for their respective purpose.
Anyway, I highly doubt the design of the Ogg container had anything to do with the popularity of Vorbis vs MP3 - most users of Vorbis used the Ogg container, and some of the criticisms in the original article apply to MP3 (ever tried to seek a VBR MP3 file?)
Your link is to an argument against the ides of using Ogg as a general purpose container format (for video in particular). This is about something different; Vorbis encoded audio which traditionally comes in an Ogg container. I have never heard the argument that the Ogg container format somehow makes Vorbis inferior to other codecs in practice.
I think that's misrepresenting the article somewhat. It mentions video in several places, because a lot of the issues stem at least in part from the complexities introduced by trying to be a general purpose container, but there are many significant problems with use of it as an audio format besides these.
Ogg containers have this problem that to change the metadata you have to rewrite the whole file whereas with ID3 it's always the last bytes at the end and highly efficient to edit.
I've dealt with the ogg container format a little and from what I saw it seemed quite reasonable, at least for the codecs it is typically used for, but for the sake of argument I'll assume everything in that article is correct.
In that case, ogg competes because it beats AAC on quality per unit size (low bitrate vorbis supposedly beats out low bitrate AAC at least, and I guess opus is supposed to be really good), and FLAC, which usually comes in its own container format but sometimes is distributed in an ogg, has smaller file sizes than ALAC.
I don't think AAC had much traction before it became the iTunes Store format, and ALAC remains one of the least common codecs. Both of them would have lost out to vorbis and flac. Perhaps the reason they were chosen is because they have standardized DRM solutions (at least AAC).
I think people interested in AAC probably aren't using it at low bitrates, so I'm not sure how meaningful that is. At more reasonable bitrates for people who care about quality (and thus are using AAC over MP3 in the first place) I don't think there's enough difference to discern on most listening devices - but I've not done any sort of scientific testing between the two myself, so I could very well be wrong on this.
FLAC vs ALAC is a much stronger argument IMO - though elsewhere in these comments there's a suggestion that ALAC was chosen as it was cheaper to decode on Apple's hardware at the time, which if true would be a reasonable motivation.
MP3 seems to be one of the cases where patents seem to have not hindered the spread of information. The inventor made a small amount of money, and decodes and encoders proliferated. MP3 dominated music. And there's no shortage of open source (which, I know, is not what RMS wants) code available.
This is not the catastrophic situation that I was told to expect from patentable file formats.
For many years, nobody shipped implementations of MP3 at all; there are still Linux distributions today that don't provide support for MP3 out of the box. Many don't support MP4/h264, either.
In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia:
> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]
This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.
I think the situation in the second to last paragraph is now the usual case, not the exceptional case, as defensibility in today's market has shifted from technical feats to network effects.
I was especially annoyed when I still had an iPod, because substantial parts of my music library are in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which Apple could support without paying a single cent in licensing, yet iPod - at least a couple of years back - only supported MP3 and AAC. :-|
I would assume the patents on MP3 have expired by now, is anyone in a position to confirm or deny this?