Introduction

Ogg Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com) is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-free (subject to speculation), and royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8khz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to >256 kbps/channel. This places vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as mpeg-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance MP3, twinvq (VQF), WMA and PAC.

Vorbis is the first of a planned family of Ogg multimedia coding formats being developed as part of xiphophorus's ogg multimedia project.

Informal listening test suggest Vorbis to be comparable to mpeg-4 AAC at most bitrates and MPC at 128kbs. Transparency is generally reached at about 150-170kbps (with some exceptions). The encoder is reasonably young and unoptimized, so further improvements can be expected.

Unfortunately, Xiph.org has failed to improve Vorbis at a steady rate since its initial 1.0 release in July 2002. Since then development has been lead by other coders such as Garf and Aoyumi, who have improved the quality particularly at high bitrates. Aoyumi's AoTuV series of encoders was incorporated into the August 2004 (??) release of 1.1, which bought about the first quality improvements across the board for 2 years.

Pros

Free (as in speech), Open Source and claimed to be patent free
Good all-round performance (>48kbs - a leading codec at 128kbs)
Well written specs
Several portable hardware players
Suitable for internet-streaming (via Icecast)
Fully gapless playback

Cons

Limited official development
More computationally intensive to encode and decode than MP3
Quality at high bitrates could benefit from further tuning

Features of compression

Advanced psymodel
Coupled stereo modes (lossy and lossless)
Huffman coding
Vector quantization
Modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT)
Multiple block sizes for block switching

Software

Encoders

oggenc

Decoders

QuickTime Component (Allows playback in QuickTime/iTunes)
CoreVorbis (DirectShow)

Hardware

The following player support playback of Ogg Vorbis.