Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary"

a nona maus writes "Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to."

Well, isn't it obvious?

They don't like open standards.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I still don't understand why though.

Apart from it not supporting DRM, ogg has only advantages - it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior) and it's open-source w/o patents restrictions...

Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I still don't understand why though. .... Apart from it not supporting DRM

You have your answer.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

If they MUST have DRM, I have a great win-win solution for them.

They should encode their increadibly valuable content by moving it to the /dev/null 'encoder'. That way, nobody will ever be able to view even a split second of their content without paying and everyone else can be sure that they won't get ripped off with content that won't actually play properly where and when they want it to.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

They should encode their increadibly valuable content by moving it to the /dev/null 'encoder'. That way, nobody will ever be able to view even a split second of their content without paying

As a side benefit, /dev/null has a truly stunning compression. As long as they use /dev/null they could fit staggering amount of content onto their servers....

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

It's also the only compression method that, when compressing RIAA material, actually improves the quality of the recording!

=Smidge=

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Just the other day I was compressing Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" to /dev/null, and it came back much truer to the name than the original.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

So /dev/null converted your copy of Sounds of Silence to the acoustic version? Cool.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

You guys are such sheep. I don't follow the norm, I listen to /dev/random.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I just downloaded Microsoft's /dev/null decoder, and it's 8 gigs...

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Firstly, they must see if they will make profit with DRM. See the DRM equation for this :
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation [frimouvy.org]

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Yep, agreed, Ogg, Vorbis, doomed to failure. Been doomed to failure for most of a decade. Any moment now, it'll be nothing but a memory. Here it goes...going...going...Hmm...not gone yet. Interesting. But it will I tell you! It'll be dead in no time now!

Hint: Have you any idea at all how many video games use Ogg? And can you think of why that might be?

No one used DAT tapes for their media collections...and yet, it was most certainly not a failure. You know, sometimes there's room for more than one technology. There's these things called niches. There are internal, closed systems. Not everything is a consumer end product.

We do not have to discuss Ogg in terms of being an end user accepted format for it to be a viable format. And it has most certainly proven itself and become very entrenched in certain areas.

But hey, you just go on and argue for the sake of arguing mmkay?

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Actually Nokia has a great history with "open" standards (generally defined as RAND as opposed to royalty free). In fact Nokia's entire current business comes out of it's ability to cooperate with arch rivals such as Ericsson to build open standards such as NMT, GSM and WCDMA. So the question is not "why is Nokia opposed to open standards?". The question is "why is Nokia opposing this standard?"

Reading through the document, it's actually much more reaonable (DRM should be possible, but shouldn't be mandatory) than implied. The OGG thing, however, is very interesting. To me it almost reads like they know someone who has a fundamental patent on OGG. A fundamental patent is one which can't be avoided to implement a standard and thus guarantees control of the standard. However, give that Xiph.org have done a patent search and claim that OGG is patent free and nobody has contradicted them, I can think of at least two more likely things here.

a) the recent Microsoft / Nokia WMA licensing agreements have seriously crippled Nokias freedom to operate with different formats.

b) they are afraid of the fact that whilst OGG is open, control of how the standard evolves is "proprietary". By this they mean not under control of an "open" standardisation body that they can join. Looking at it; Xiph.org seems to have too much industry independence.

Make no mistake, though, the Nokia of five years ago is probably not the Nokia of today. Where old Nokia was trying to deliver devices to let you do whatever you wanted to do, new Nokia is trying to become a media company and that means is almost certainly joining the dark side.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Apart from it not supporting DRM, ogg has only advantages - it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior) and it's open-source w/o patents restrictions...

Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?

Ogg isn't a codec. It's a container format. Vorbis is the audio codec in question, and Theora is the video codec in question.

Theora was created using proprietary code and patented techniques developed by On2 and used in their VP3 codec, adapted to fit inside an Ogg container. There are tools to let you convert existing VP3 streams into Ogg streams.

The Xiph.org foundation negotiated free access for all to those patented technology before adapting and adopting it. From the Theora FAQ [theora.org]:

Yes, some portions of the VP3 codec are covered by patents. However, the Xiph.org Foundation has negotiated an irrevocable free license to the VP3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public. It is legal to use VP3 in any way you see fit (unless, of course, you're doing something illegal with it in your particular jurisdiction). You are free to download VP3, use it free of charge, implement it in a for-sale product, implement it in a free product, make changes to the source and distribute those changes, or print the source code out and wallpaper your spare room with it.

The paper from Nokia seems to revolve around the fact that it doesn't support DRM from what I can see.

Re:Ogg is an audio codec

Err, no.

Ogg is like Quicktime or ASF. There's nothing technically stopping anybody from delivering a mp3 inside an Ogg (seriously), Quicktime, or ASF container. Here's proof:

Putting a .mp3 inside an ogg container with no encoding:

$ ogmmerge -o test.ogg theatre\ of\ tragedy\ -\ cassandra.mp3
Using MP3 demultiplexer for theatre of tragedy - cassandra.mp3.
+-> Using MP3 output module for audio stream.
progress: 6538263/6538263 bytes (100%)

Verifying that it's an ogg container:

$ file test.ogg
test.ogg: Ogg data

Mplayer shows how it's both an ogg container and the audio is MP3 (parts snipped, stupid lameness filter)

$ mplayer test.ogg
Playing test.ogg.
Ogg file format detected.
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
Video: no video
Starting playback...

Re:Time to whip out the STFU gun!

Look. It's Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is the container. Vorbis is the format.

I don't care. I've never seen a .vorbis file. All I've ever seen is a .ogg file, .ogg files contain music that plays well on my computer, but unlike .mp3-files, not so well on my mp3-player.

If you can't handle that, if you think it's too geeky, please step away from your computer and smash it to bits, as you're far too stupid to deal with modern technology. Might I suggest a career in waste disposal?

Look, if you can't handle that 99% of the world just doesn't care about containers and codecs, but use the file extension to determine media format, you are seriously lacking in social intelligence, and need to be confined to live in solitude for the rest of your life. May I suggest a career in computers?

Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

Ogg is not "equal or superior to most other codecs" because it's not a codec. It's a container file that holds content compressed using a codec.

Ogg is comparable with Apple's QuickTime container format (MOV), Microsoft's former AVI (based on IFF), Microsoft's newer ASF, the rival FOSS Matroska container, or the ISO's MPEG-4 container (MP4, based on QuickTime).

When you talk about Ogg being a "good codec," it demonstrates the kind of impractical, blind bias for free-sounding buzzword projects, which FOSS advocates are quick favor over real open standards that are accepted and established. Ogg isn't open vs closed MPEG-4; they're both open containers available for non-discriminatory licensing. The difference is that there are only some theoretical uses of Ogg and a single source of documentation and libraries for it, while MPEG-4 is in use everywhere, has support across the industry, and has wide hardware support in silicon, because the MPEG-4 container is paired with a portfolio of codecs that people actually use. Ogg also competes with other FOSS containers such as Matroska, so it's not the lone FOSS messiah at all.

Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations).

After realizing there was no reason to fight MPEG-4 with a proprietary runner up, On2 donated Theora to Xiph to use with Ogg, and Xiph published it as an open specification. However, Microsoft basically did the same thing: it published WMV with the SMPTE group as an "open standard" called VC1.

If you think Microsoft's VC1--which it's using to compete against the open MPEG-4--is an "open standard," then you can also say Theora is. It's easier to describe both as failed proprietary technologies that nobody uses, although Microsoft is pushing VC1 hard in HD-DVD and in Windows Vista.

For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd. It means that rather than having one set of codecs that the world contributes toward, we'll have an official joke that nobody uses decreed the "standard" while everyone actually uses MPEG-4 / H.264 (and probably H.265 by the time HTML5 arrives).

This is not a case of OpenDocument vs MS-XML, open vs closed. It's closer to a case of GPL v3 vs BSD/Apache: rhetoric vs reality. Trying to rip apart MPEG-4 and install an openly published version of a failed proprietary standard that nobody uses in its place will only hand the lead to Microsoft's VC-1 (which itself is a proprietary version of H.263). What would that accomplish?

Supporters for Ogg/Theora are voting for a Ross Perot, assuring that we'll really get a George Bush. What we really need is an Al Gore: centrist, workable, functional, capable, and proven to work.

If that analogy lost you: pushing Ogg/Theora might make you proud to have voted, but it will only distract from the industry's coalition to unitedly back H.264 from mobile devices to HD. There's far more FOSS support for MPEG-4 and H.264 than for Ogg/Theora and the rest of the outdated codecs Xiph has salvaged from the dumpster of proprietary efforts. Having wide support behind one good, open portfolio of standards will make it easier for FOSS to compete with and participate in the desktop computing world.

Why Low Def is the New HD [roughlydrafted.com]
Origins of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD War [roughlydrafted.com]

ITU & ISO MPEG-4 codecs and container [roughlydrafted.com]

Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

Which costs more to distribute, an mp4 stream or an ogg stream?

According to a news release [mpegla.com] from 2002 which is hosted on the MPEG LA site, the price for mp4 was:

2. In the case of Internet (wired and wireless) or mobile, annual royalties with annual limitations and thresholds will apply: (a) for the manufacture and sale of decoders and/or encoders: US $0.25 per activated decoder and/or encoder subject to an annual cap per legal entity of $1,000,000 for decoders and $1,000,000 for encoders (to be paid by the manufacturer that offers functioning product for sale or distribution, either directly or through a chain of distribution, to the end user), but there is no royalty for the first 50,000 decoders and first 50,000 encoders in a calendar year sold or distributed by a legal entity (applies to no more than one legal entity in an affiliated group); (b) for the use of decoders and encoders to decode or encode MPEG-4 video (to be paid by the party that is the apparent source of such video to the consumer), a licensee may choose to pay US $0.25 per subscriber per year or US $0.000333 per minute of MPEG-4 video used, each subject to an annual cap of $1,000,000 per legal entity, or a $1,000,000 annual paid-up fee (with no royalty reporting obligation), but no royalty is payable on the first 50,000 subscribers during a calendar year (applies to no more than one legal entity in an affiliated group). Subscriber refers to each unique viewer for any part of a year, but where the content provider's remuneration is not directly from subscriptions (e.g., advertiser-supported services), MPEG LA will work directly with Licensees to come up with a consistent method of counting subscribers that works with their business models.

3. In the case of Stored Video (packaged media and video transmitted and stored for viewing for which a transactional fee is paid), the replicator or content provider will pay (a) US $0.01 per 30 minutes or part to a maximum of US $0.04 per movie; (b) US $0.005 per 30 minutes or part thereof to a maximum of US $0.02 per movie where the content of the Stored Video is 5 years or older (after it was copyrighted or subject to be copyrighted), and (c) US $0.002 for a Stored Video of 12 minutes or less.

So, if the current terms even vaguely approach this older release, the difference in price/time sacrifice for the higher file size is more than offset by the pricing. Dollars and cents, free and open makes sense.

Anyone got current/more accurate pricing info?

Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

I think you're missing the point. Nokia and many other companies have already paid the MPEG-4 license fees, because if they shipped a device that only supports Vorbis+Theora then customers would complain that "this thing can't play any videos that I have". In the real world, MPEG-4/H.264 is it. That's why there are a ton of HOWTOs about installing "free" MPEG-4 codecs under Linux. There are virtually no tools to encode in Theora and thus virtually no content. I doubt that will change if W3C makes Theora mandatory to implement in Web browsers. What would actually happen is that browsers would implement both "mandatory" Theora and "optional" MPEG-4 and people would go on using MPEG-4 like they do today. Thus Nokia would not save any money on patent licenses, and they'd have to spend more money on supporting a codec that no one uses.

Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

You are correct in saying Ogg is not a codec. But when you compare Theora to VC-1, you must not have been reading the license terms of VC-1 properly. VC-1 is riddled by patents and there are royalites to pay when you use it: http://www.mpegla.com/pid/vc1/ [mpegla.com] . There is no such thing as royalties to pay for Theora. Also, the only patent on Theora were ones owned by On2 Technologies, who donated their VP3 codec as the *basis* technology for Theora and kindly granted an unrevocable free license regarding those patents: http://www.theora.org/benefits/ [theora.org]. As for quality - yes, Theora is a generation behind in compression technology and H.264 is much better quality at lower bitrates. Again - have you read the license conditions? Theora is simply the only open codec standard (as to the definition of Open Standard by Buce Perens: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/Definition.html [perens.com]) with a usable implementation. Mind you, I would watch out for the BBC's Dirac codec http://dirac.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] which is based on Wavelet technology and is thus opening a whole new space of new video codec developments and improvements - a space H.264 didn't enter. And Dirac is an open standard.

Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

Ogg isn't open vs closed MPEG-4; they're both open containers available for non-discriminatory licensing.

There is no such thing as non-discriminatory licensing. If I have to beg permission of some patent holder to use it, then it is discriminatory. It's discriminating against people building players that do not have a revenue model (read: most FOSS players) with which to pay for licensing fees.

"Non-discriminatory" simply means that the patent holder can't charge Sony a different price per unit than they charge Microsoft. And they'll charge me that same fee, which is of course set based on the assumption that only Sony and Microsoft and companies of their size and revenue model are going to be licensing it. Can you afford $1 every time your movie player is downloaded by someone through APT on Debian/Ubuntu? I can't. That means that I am being discriminated against in terms of access to the codec.

When H.264 can be legally implemented by any "kid in his basement" and distributed to the world without any permission, license fee, or NDA involved, then we can discuss it as an "open web standard". Until then, it is neither open nor free, nor should it be a de jure "standard" for anything. Ogg/Vorbis+Theora, however, can be. Their relative technological merits are not in dispute.

Yes there is

Non-discriminatory doesn't mean "Doing whatever anyone wants," it just means being consistent. In the case of a license it means two things:

1) The license must be available to all comers. You do not get to choose who gets a license, anyone who pays the fee gets a license.

2) The fee must be fixed. One person can't get a sweetheart deal and another get the shaft.

You meet those criteria, that is a non-discriminatory license, you aren't discriminating.

Take a situation where I own a bar. If I have a night where I sell beer to any customer for $2, that's a non-discriminatory special. Whoever you are, you get to have beer for that price. However if I run a special where only girls in tight shirts get $2 beers, that's a discriminatory special. I am dictating who or what you must be or do to get the pricing.

Trying to redefine things just because you don't like how it works doesn't change how it really is. You aren't being discriminated against just because someone won't give you something for free. You are only being discriminated against if they will give it to someone else for free, but not you.

Re:Shoot me, I'm the Messenger

You're missing the point here: Vorbis + Theora is the only major non-patent-encumbered (and therefore legal to use commercially or in free software without paying a bunch of lawyers to figure out what patent fees you owe who) option for video.

MPEG-4 and similar are great for pirates and organizations big enough to have patent lawyers on staff - but standards have to do better than that. Small companies and free software projects have to be able to play too.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I'm sure that I'll be modded down for my following comment, but I post it anyway:

Vorbis is pretty much dead. While its quality is good, Vorbis has quite high performance requirements just for decoding (negligible on current desktop PCs, but not on portables that run on battery). Even Vorbis's developer Xiph.org acknowledged that and instead of trying to "fix" Vorbis, they started development of an entirely new audio codec called Ghost.

While Vorbis and Theora are in no way proprietary, the industry already decided to support MPEG-4. Even Microsoft supports it out of the box on Xbox 360 and Zune. Vorbis was cool when it was released, but it never had a modern video codec as companion.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

It's funny that you responded to an article about video with a rambling about audio. It's however hilarious that it got modded Insightful.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...

Well thats par for the course here, slashy tends to be more of a fanzine.

I read the Nokia paper, the summary seems to misrepresent it. Some of the points were actually ones that I had made at the W3C AC plenary: Some of the older audio and video formats are comming out of patent soon, it might be nice to know precisely when. I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.

I know that ACC and H.264 offer better compression and in fact I expect them to be used to deliver the bulk of Web content. The trick is how to ensure that the cost of using these technologies is proportional to the value of the bandwidth that they save (a few hundred million dollars) rather than the value of the applications they enable (a few hundred billion dollars).

One of the somewhat frustrating problems here is that useful comparisons of compression quality are pretty hard to come by. One comparison I read disqualified Ogg Theora because it did not compress The Matrix to fit on a CD. In other words a totally arbitrary cut off point. Why choose that movie, who cares about the capacity of a CDROM?

Quite a few MPEG2 patents have expired already, it would take a lot of work to find out when they all expire though. Main question would be what happens with submarine patents at this point.

The reason I prefer this approach is that I just don't think that anyone can invent a new video compression scheme and be sure that it is unencumbered. We thought that GIF was unencumbered when we made it the standard image format for the Web, turned out that we were wrong but there was no way we could have known at the time. I don't like chosing Ogg for the same reason, I would prefer to be absolutely sure we have an unencumbered spec which means choosing something obsolete.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Uhh...Ogg was designed specifically to be open and patent free.
It can never be like GIF.

I dont see what Nokia is talking about however.
W3C is making a tag for html (or similar) and they need a open format which everyone can use.
Why any DRM is required is puzzling because a) everyone has to be able to view it and b) its video over the net.
You probably wouldn't be buying a movie and then streaming it over the net in your browser (or your phone).

Infact Nokia's own selection criteria is contradictory since you can never have a completely open DRM system.
It requires security by obscruity otherwise everyone can bypass it easily.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

What makes Mp3 easier than Ogg? iTunes. iPod. Ordinary people aren't in love with Mp3 it's just what works. Until Apple decides to allow Ogg on the iPod then forget about it ever being standard. I know, you can get custom firmware that allows it. I doubt the average user, who doesn't know the difference between Ogg, Mp3 or AAC, will really be up for a firmware hunt.

I wish Ogg ruled the roost. I do. I wish any open, cross platform format ruled, but it's unlikely to happen.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Except for the technical advantages. I can take a PCM file from a ripped cd and encode it with similar settings in iTunes (aac), neroenc (aac), lame, and the vorbis encoder, and everything but lame and vorbis sound like the range is compressed too far, and mp3 sounds poor on some tracks that are difficult to encode, but on the vorbis version those same passages are not as annoying.

I've done this on multiple tracks on multiple machines with good earphones, vorbis is always the least annoying for passages with encoder defects. However i do have an 3gen nano so vorbis isn't a real option, nor is alternative firmware.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

The engineer's mantra: If it aint broke, fix it till it is.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Well you could always get a mp3 player that rockbox supports and install that. Not only does it support .ogg, but it also supports another feature that is rarely found on mp3 players, true gapless playback.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I can verify this. However, the iPod causes a loud click when the buffer starts about one second before the current track ends. Rockbox doesn't have this issue. You can also change the buffer length in Rockbox. I think the iPod's is only a half second, to be honest.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

they are doing something seriously wrong (in which I'd incluide living in expensive small-town American and/or getting married and having kids)

This is a reasonable economic conclusion in much of the United States, and that's a serious social problem. Any society where people frequently make a practical decision not to have children is basically doomed.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

Nobody in Western countries has to work multiple jobs unless they are doing something seriously wrong

You're a student, and someone who occludes "veteran" and "conscientious objector."

To put it plainly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Not having well-off parents to foot the bill for college to give you a unique skill-set is not "something seriously wrong." A good portion of any country lives in poverty, and if you're not a member of a welfare state, when you hit rock bottom you really do need to go work full time just to survive.

Note that most folk who work multiple jobs don't have a single full-time job. They may average 50-60 hours per week among their 2-5 jobs, but since none of their jobs pay benefits and they have higher-than-ordinary travel expenses, they need to work that much just to survive.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

I ripped my whole CD collection in ogg about a year ago. Last week, I went to buy my first mp3 player, and I can't find a single one in my "budget" price range that has ogg support. I'm stuck re-ripping or downloading my entire library.

I find it hard to believe that this didn't occur to you a year back. Seriously, anyone who knows enough to want to rip their collection to Ogg would almost certainly know that it wasn't as widely-supported as MP3.

Personally, I'm happy to accept that Ogg is a better format (in terms of the space/quality tradeoff) than MP3. But I also know that MP3 is almost universally supported and Ogg isn't.

I genuinely had my suspicions that the quote above was a cut-and-paste anti-Ogg troll; it has the air of masquerading as someone who'd tried out the open source choice and been burnt by it... except that- as I mentioned- most potential Ogg users would already have known about these issues. I'm genuinely surprised that you didn't look into this before you decided to rip your music collection.