Ogg objections (2010)

#1

Post by cpeterso » Thu, Nov 19, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

Ogg objections (2010)
hardwarebug.org

Re: Ogg objections (2010)

#2

Post by aaronbrethorst » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

Objections:

    Generality
    Overhead
    Latency
    Random access
    Timestamps
    Complexity

I'd like to add one more:

One of the worst examples of branding I've ever seen from an open source project. Ogg? It sounds kind of like a portmanteau of odd and egg. Who wants to use that?

Re: Ogg objections (2010)

#3

Post by simoncion » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 3:45 AM UTC

> Those objecting that this index would be unavailable in a streaming scenario are forgetting that seeking is impossible there regardless.

"Streaming" can also mean "playback of and/or seeking within a partially downloaded file". It's awfully nice to start watching that multi-gigabyte video within seconds, rather than minutes or hours and be able to rewind and fast-forward through the parts that are already on (and continue to be delivered to) your system.

Re: Ogg objections (2010)

#4

Post by mark4o » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 4:24 AM UTC

Monty wrote up a detailed response to this in 2010: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.h...

Re: Ogg objections (2010)

#5

Post by J_Darnley » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 4:32 AM UTC

An objection I have: metadata tags. Let me start with it. The Vorbis Comment structure has a framing bit. This is only used for the comment packet on Vorbis streams. Theora, Flac (and Flac native), and Speex do not use it. I'm not sure about Opus.

The good point is that the rest is simple and relatively flexible. 4 bytes as a number of tags each with a 4 byte length. Definitely excessive and perhaps should have some flag for different versions. 1, 2, 3, and 4 byte lengths and count. Keys being limited in the spec to ASCII printable is a downside but since it's utf8, 0x3d (the equals sign =) would still work as the key-value separator. The spec also says that they should be case insensitive which would make the utf8 comparisons harder.