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, libvorbis.[10] Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format[11] and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
Not to be confused with Vobis.
Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[12][13] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[14][15] The Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project).[16][17] Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until the Vorbis file format was frozen for 1.0 in May 2000.[2][3][18] Originally licensed as LGPL, in 2001 the Vorbis license was changed to the BSD license to encourage adoption, with the endorsement of Richard Stallman.[19][20] A stable version (1.0) of the reference software was released on July 19, 2002.[21][22][23]
Since February 2013,[24] Xiph.Org has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec, which is also a Xiph.Org Foundation project and also free and open-source. Compared to Vorbis, Opus can simultaneously achieve higher compression efficiency—per both Xiph.Org itself and third-party listening tests[25][26]—and lower encode/decode latency (in most cases, low enough for real-time applications such as internet telephony or live singing, rarely possible with Vorbis).[27]
Name[edit]
Vorbis is named after the character Exquisitor Vorbis in the Discworld novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. The Ogg format is not named after the Pratchett character Nanny Ogg, but after ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek.[13]
Licensing[edit]
Knowledge of Vorbis' specifications is in the public domain.[8] Concerning the specification itself, the Xiph.Org Foundation reserves the right to set the Vorbis specification and certify compliance. Its libraries are released under the revised 3-clause BSD license and its tools are released under the GNU General Public License. The libraries were originally released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence, but a BSD license was later chosen with the endorsement of Richard Stallman.[53] The Xiph.Org Foundation states that Vorbis, like all its developments, is completely free from the licensing or patent issues raised by proprietary formats. Although the Xiph.Org Foundation states it has conducted a patent search that supports its claims, outside parties (notably engineers working on rival formats) have expressed doubt that Vorbis is free of patented technology.[54]
The Xiph.Org Foundation has not released an official statement on the patent status of Vorbis, pointing out that such a statement is technically impossible due to the number and scope of patents in existence and the questionable validity of many of them. Such issues can only be resolved by a court of law.
Vorbis is supported by several large digital audio player manufacturers such as Samsung, SanDisk, Rio, Neuros Technology, Cowon, and iriver.
Support[edit]
Hardware[edit]
Tremor, a version of the Vorbis decoder which uses fixed-point arithmetic (rather than floating point), was made available to the public on September 2, 2002 (also under a BSD-style license).[55] Tremor, or platform-specific versions based on it, is more suited to implementation on the limited facilities available in commercial portable players. A number of versions that make adjustments for specific platforms and include customized optimizations for given embedded microprocessors have been produced. Several hardware manufacturers have expressed intentions to produce Vorbis-compliant devices and new Vorbis devices seem to be appearing at a steady rate.