OggSquish is one of the first names used for the

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality d ...

project developed from 1994 by the Xiphophorus company (now

Xiph.Org Foundation Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec d ...

). Ogg Squish was also an attempt from the Xiphophorus company to create a

royalty-free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standard ...

lossless Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

audio compression

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or da ...

History

The Ogg project began with a simple audio compression package as part of a larger project in 1993. The original name of the software was Squish, but due to an existing

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from others ...

it was later renamed to OggSquish. This name was later used for the whole Ogg project. In 1997, the Xiphophorus OggSquish was described as "an attempt both to create a flexible compressed audio format for modern audio applications as well as to provide the first audio format that is common on any and every modern computer platform". In 1998, after

Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...

Integrated Circuits Institute intended to sue

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

development projects because of license issues, the Xiphophorus company's focus was moved to a royalty-free

lossy In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

audio compression codec, named OggSquish

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

, or only "Ogg Vorbis" or "Vorbis". In 2000, the OggSquish was referred to as "a group of several related multimedia and signal processing projects". In 2000, two projects were in active development for planned release: Ogg Vorbis format and libvorbis - the reference implementation of Vorbis. Research also included work on future video and lossless audio coding. In 2001, OggSquish was renamed to "Ogg" and it was described as "the umbrella for a group of several related multimedia and signal processing projects". Ogg has come to stand for the container

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

, as part of the larger Xiph.org multimedia project. Squish became just the name of one of the Ogg codecs. In 2000 and 2001 there was some information from Xiphophorus company's developers about plans for a continuation of Ogg Squish as a lossless audio compression. On January 29, 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation officially announced the incorporation of

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

as a lossless audio compression codec under Xiph.org banner. Ogg Squish is no longer maintained.

References

Lossless audio codecs Free audio codecs Xiph.Org projects {{Multimedia-software-stub