Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
What is an OGG?
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A codec called Ogg Vorbis. See
https://xiph.org/vorbis/
Technically, Vorbis is the audio codec, and Ogg is the container format used to hold Vorbis encoded audio files.
Vorbis got its start after an announcement that royalties would be charged for use of the popular MP3 format. It's not the first time something like that has occurred.
The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) compressed image file format was a response to attempts to charge for use of GIF files. GIFs were encoded using Lev-Zempel-Welch compression. Terry Welch was an employee of Sperry (now part of Unisys) when he wrote the paper describing a simplified form of the Lev-Zempel algorithm that would be easier to implement on a computer. His employment contract specified that work he did on company time was company property.
Compuserve made extensive use of GIF files in its service, Unisys belatedly woke up and realized they had IP rights to code used to make the GIFs, and started suing to collect royalties. PNG was an effort to create an open, royalty free image compression format that could be deployed without worries about getting sued for using it.
Unisys's patent rights on LZW compression have since expired, so it's no longer relevant.
More recently, we got HTML5. A major incentive to implementing it is the <video> keyword that lets you embed video without using a Shockwave Flash object and requiring a Flash player to view it. You still need a codec to decode and play the video, but the codec will be part of the web browser, and not a third party plugin.
Ah, but
which codec? The default standard was H_264, which was proprietary and required a license fee. YouTube had a test site a while back where you could test HTML5 video and see how it performed (and fall back to Flash if it didn't.) Internet Explorer and Google Chrome would play the HTML5 videos using H_264 because Microsoft and Google had paid the license fee and could include the codec with their browsers. Firefox could not play the videos. The problem was that Firefox was open source, and needed to distribute source code for all components of the browser. They could not distribute source for the H_264 codec.
Things heated up when Google decided to make Chrome open source, and was actively investigating open source codecs like Theora that would provide performance and compression equivalent to H_264 as an alternative they could offer source for.
Cisco Systems finally broke the logjam by negotiating an H_264 license that would let them offer a reference implementation in source form, and that's what everyone uses now.
Intellectual property is
such fun...
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Dennis