Ogg is a free,

open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001 * ''Open'' (YF ...

container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by

software patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm. Background A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time, u ...

s and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality

digital multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

. Its name is derived from "ogging",

jargon Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular Context (language use), communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The conte ...

from the computer game ''

Netrek ''Netrek'' is an Internet game for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open-source software. It combines features of multi-directional shooters and team-based real-time strategy games. Players attempt to disable or destroy ...

''. The Ogg container format can

multiplex Multiplex may refer to: * Multiplex (automobile), a former American car make * Multiplex (comics), a DC comic book supervillain * Multiplex (company), a global contracting and development company * Multiplex (assay), a biological assay which measu ...

a number of independent

streams A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream ...

for

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...

, text (such as

subtitles Subtitles and captions are lines of dialogue or other text displayed at the bottom of the screen in films, television programs, video games or other visual media. They can be transcriptions of the screenplay, translations of it, or informati ...

), and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

. In the Ogg multimedia framework,

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

provides a

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 ...

video layer. The audio layer is most commonly provided by the music-oriented

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 conj ...

format Format may refer to: Printing and visual media * Text formatting, the typesetting of text elements * Paper formats, or paper size standards * Newspaper format, the size of the paper page Computing * File format, particular way that informatio ...

or its successor

Opus ''Opus'' (pl. ''opera'') is a Latin word meaning "work". Italian equivalents are ''opera'' (singular) and ''opere'' (pl.). Opus or OPUS may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * Opus number, (abbr. Op.) specifying order of (usually) publicatio ...

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 formats include

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 ...

, and

OggPCM 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 ...

. Before 2007, the .ogg

filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (e.g., .txt, .docx, .md). The extension indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically d ...

was used for all files whose content used the Ogg container format. Since 2007, the Xiph.Org Foundation recommends that .ogg only be used for Ogg Vorbis audio files. The Xiph.Org Foundation decided to create a new set of file extensions and media types to describe different types of content such as .oga for audio only files, .ogv for video with or without sound (including Theora), and .ogx for multiplexed Ogg. As of November 7, 2017, the current version of the Xiph.Org Foundation's reference implementation is libogg 1.3.3. Another version, libogg2, has been in development, but is awaiting a rewrite as of 2018. Both

software libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

are

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

, released under the

New BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

. Ogg reference implementation was separated from Vorbis on September 2, 2000.Xiph.Org (2002-07-19
Ogg releases - libogg-1.0.tar.gz - CHANGES
. Retrieved 2009-09-01. Because the format is free, and its reference implementation is not subject to restrictions associated with

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

, Ogg's various

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 ...

s have been incorporated into a number of different free and

proprietary {{Short pages monitor one or more METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE=… in a ''VorbisComment'' for thumbnails and cover art have

Base64 In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data (more specifically, a sequence of 8-bit bytes) in sequences of 24 bits that can be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits. Common to all bina ...

-encoded values of the corresponding

METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE. In other words, FLAC stores thumbnails and cover art in binary blocks—outside of the FLAC tags in a

little-endian In computing, endianness, also known as byte sex, is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the most si ...

METADATA_BLOCK_VORBIS_COMMENT. Other existing and proposed mechanisms are: *

metadata blocks * Ogg Skeleton *

Continuous Media Markup Language Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML) is to audio or video what HTML is to text. CMML is essentially a timed text codec. It allows file creators to structure a time-continuously sampled data file by dividing it into temporal sections (also called ...

(deprecated)

History

The Ogg project began with a simple audio compression package as part of a larger project in 1993. The software was originally named ''Squish'' but due to an existing trade mark it was 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". The OggSquish was in 2000 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

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 2009, Ogg is described as "a multimedia container format, and the native file and stream format for the Xiph.org multimedia codecs". The Ogg reference implementation was separated from Vorbis on September 2, 2000. In May 2003, two Internet RFCs were published relating to the format. The Ogg bitstream was defined in (which is classified as 'informative') and its Internet content type (application/ogg) in (which is, , a proposed standard protocol). In September 2008, RFC 3534 was obsoleted by , which added content types video/ogg, audio/ogg and filename extensions .ogx, .ogv, .oga, .spx.

OGM

In 2002, the lack of formal video support in Ogg resulted in the development of the ''OGM'' file format, a hack on Ogg that allowed embedding of video from the Microsoft

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

framework into an Ogg-based wrapper. OGM was initially supported only by closed source Windows-only tools, but the codebase was subsequently opened. Later, video (and subtitle) support were formally specified for Ogg but in a manner incompatible with OGM. Independently, the

Matroska Matroska is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4, or Adva ...

container format reached maturity and provided an alternative for people interested in combining Vorbis audio and arbitrary video codecs. As a result, OGM is no longer supported or developed and is formally discouraged by Xiph.org. Today, video in Ogg is found with the .ogv file extension, which is formally specified and officially supported. Software and codecs that support .ogm files are available without charge.

2006

Although Ogg had not reached anywhere near the ubiquity of the

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...

standards (e.g.,

MP3 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 ...

/ MP4), , it was commonly used to encode free content (such as free music, multimedia on

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

projects and

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

files) and had started to be supported by a significant minority of

digital audio player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...

s. Also supporting the Ogg format were many popular video game engines, including ''

Doom 3 ''Doom 3'' is a 2004 survival horror first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. ''Doom 3'' was originally released for Microsoft Windows on August 3, 2004, adapted for Linux later that year, and ported ...

'', ''

Unreal Tournament 2004 ''Unreal Tournament 2004'' is a first-person arena shooter video game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. Part of the ''Unreal'' franchise, it is the third game in the ''Unreal Tournament'' series and the sequel to ''Unreal Tournament ...

'', '' Halo: Combat Evolved'', ''

Jets'n'Guns ''Jets'n'Guns'' is a 2004 2D horizontally scrolling shooter for Microsoft Windows by Czech studio Rake in Grass. In April 2006, a version for Mac OS X was released. In December 2006 an expansion, ''Jets'n'Guns Gold'', was released. A version fo ...

'', '' Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven'', '' Myst IV: Revelation'', '' StepMania'', '' Serious Sam: The Second Encounter'', ''

Lineage 2 ''Lineage II'' is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for Microsoft Windows and the second game in the ''Lineage'' series. It is a prequel to ''Lineage'' and is set 150 years before the first game. It has become popular sin ...

'', ''

Vendetta Online ''Vendetta Online'' is a twitch-based, science fiction massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Guild Software for the operating systems Android, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Microsoft Windows. It uses the NAOS game e ...

'', ''

Battlefield 2 ''Battlefield 2'' is a first-person shooter video game, developed by DICE (company), DICE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows in June 2005 as the third game in the Battlefield (video game series), ''Battlefield'' franchise. P ...

'', and the ''

Grand Theft Auto ''Grand Theft Auto'' (''GTA'') is a series of action-adventure games created by David Jones (video game developer), David Jones and Mike Dailly (game designer), Mike Dailly. Later titles were developed under the oversight of brothers Dan Hous ...

'' engines, as well as the audio files of the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

-based game, ''

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...

''. The more popular Vorbis codec had built-in support on many software players, and extensions were available for nearly all the rest.

2007

On May 16, 2007, the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

started a campaign to increase the use of Vorbis "as an ethically, legally and technically superior audio alternative to the proprietary MP3 format". People were also encouraged to support the campaign by adding a web button to their

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

. For those who did not want to download and use the FSF's suggested Ogg player ( VLC), the Xiph.Org Foundation had an official codec for

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

-based applications in

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, such as

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

players and iMovie applications; and Windows users could install a

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on ...

Ogg codec.

2009

By June 30, 2009, the Ogg container, through the use of the Theora and Vorbis, was the only container format included in Firefox 3.5 web browser's implementation of the

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

<video> and <audio> elements. This was in accordance with the original recommendation outlined in, but later removed from, the HTML5 draft specification (see Ogg controversy).

2010

On March 3, 2010, a technical analysis by an

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

developer was critical about the general purpose abilities of Ogg as a multimedia container format. The author of Ogg later responded to these claims in an article of his own.

Ogg codecs

Ogg is only a container format. The actual audio or video encoded by a codec is stored inside an Ogg container. Ogg containers may contain streams encoded with multiple codecs; for example, a video file with sound contains data encoded by both an audio codec and a video codec. Being a container format, Ogg can embed audio and video in various formats (such as

Dirac Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety o ...

MNG Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG) is a graphics file format, published in 2001, for animated images. Its specification is publicly documented and there are free software Free software or libre software is computer software distribute ...

CELT The Celts (, see pronunciation for different usages) or Celtic peoples () are. "CELTS location: Greater Europe time period: Second millennium B.C.E. to present ancestry: Celtic a collection of Indo-European peoples. "The Celts, an ancient ...

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...

and others) but Ogg was intended to be, and usually is, used with the following Xiph.org free codecs: * Audio **

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 ...

***

Speex Speex is an audio compression codec specifically tuned for the reproduction of human speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm.Xiph.OrIntro ...

: handles voice data at low bitrates (~2.1–32 kbit/s/channel) ***

: handles general audio data at mid to high-level

variable bitrate Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a ...

s (≈16–500 kbit/s per channel) ***

: handles voice, music and generic audio at low and high variable bitrates (≈6–510 kbit/s per channel) **

***

handles archival and high-fidelity audio data. *** OggPCM allows storing standard uncompressed PCM audio in an Ogg container * Video **

***

: based upon On2's

VP3 On2 TrueMotion VP3 is a (royalty-free) lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. There is no formal specification for the VP3 bits ...

, it is targeted at competing with

video (for example, encoded with DivX or

Xvid Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi mas ...

RealVideo RealVideo, or also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 10. RealVideo is supported ...

, or

Windows Media Video Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

. ***

Daala Daala is a video coding format under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation under the lead of Timothy B. Terriberry mainly sponsored by the Mozilla Corporation. Like Theora and Opus, Daala is available free of any royalties and its reference im ...

: a video coding format under development. *** Tarkin: an experimental and now obsolete video codec developed in 2000, 2001 and 2002 utilizing

discrete wavelet transform In numerical analysis and functional analysis, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is any wavelet transform for which the wavelets are discretely sampled. As with other wavelet transforms, a key advantage it has over Fourier transforms is temporal ...

s in the three

dimension In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a Space (mathematics), mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any Point (geometry), point within it. Thus, a Line (geometry), lin ...

s of width, height, and time. It has been put on hold after Theora became the main focus for video encoding (in August 2002). ***

: a free and open video format developed by the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

. Uses wavelet encoding. **

***

: a part of the specification of dirac covers lossless compression. ***

: a video coding format under development. * Text **

: a text/application codec for timed metadata, captioning, and formatting. **

Annodex Annodex is a digital media format developed by CSIRO to provide annotation and indexing of ''continuous media'', such as audio and video. It is based on the Ogg container format, with an XML language called CMML (Continuous Media Markup Langua ...

: A free and open source set of standards developed by

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentar ...

to annotate and index networked media. ** OggKate: An overlay codec, originally designed for karaoke and text, that can be multiplexed in Ogg.

Media types

Ogg audio media is registered as IANA

media type A media type (also known as a MIME type) is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication o ...

audio/ogg with file extensions .oga, .ogg, and .spx. It is a proper subset of the Ogg video media type video/ogg with file extension .ogv. Other Ogg applications use media type application/ogg with file extension .ogx, this is a superset of video/ogg. The

media type audio/opus with file extension .opus was registered later in

RFC RFC may refer to: Computing * Request for Comments, a memorandum on Internet standards * Request for change, change management * Remote Function Call, in SAP computer systems * Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, a modification for Sid Meier's Civ ...

and .

References

External links

* /www.xiph.org/ogg/ The Xiph.Org Foundation official webpage — Ogg*
Using Creative Commons Metadata in Ogg containers

from the

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...

* /xiph.org/quicktime/ Xiph.Org's official Ogg QuickTime Components for iTunes and iMovie (Windows and Mac OS X)
Windows Media Player codecs for Vorbis, Speex, Theora and FLAC

ffmpeg2theora
Ogg Theora encoder, commandline application for Linux and

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations th ...

{{Xiph.org Digital container formats Filename extensions Free digital container formats Open formats Xiph.Org projects

History

OGM

2006

2007

2009

2010

Ogg codecs

Media types

See also

References

External links