[MPlayer-users] Re: Free audio codec for .AVI files ?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 03:59:14AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> >10.Both MKV and OGM are designed by people who have no competence or
> >   experience whatsoever with video coding. No, writing a GUI to wrap
> >   DirectShow is NOT VIDEO CODING.
> 
> Does this objection apply to the Ogg container itself, or just to OGM?
> As I understand it, the latter is a bad implementation of the former,
> but that doesn't preclude the same design problems existing in Ogg as a
> whole.

The ogg container is also bad for just plain audio. It increases the
file size, increases the complexity required in a player, and the
_only_ benefits it offers over a raw vorbis stream are (a) the ability
to see the current timestamp, and seek if you're willing to do binary
search, and (b) the ability to store multiple streams in one file (IMO
this is actually bad for audio-only files). By default, their encoder
puts a _random_ stream id on each file that's encoded, so if you want
to concatenate multiple files (e.g. for a streaming "radio" system),
you have to rewrite all the stream ids, which in turn requires
recomputing all the (useless) checksums, which in turn requires cpu
time. Very uncool.

In comparison, mp3 files are just streams of raw mpeg audio frames,
which are nice and simple.

The Xiph people did a very nice job designing vorbis, but ogg is just
really bad... IMO they should stick to what they're good at, which is
audio codecs. 

Rich