History

(For a highly detailed description of Vorbis historic, check out OggZealot's Ogg Vorbis Historic where Monty also adds a few more details too). Ogg Vorbis reached version 1.0 in July of 2002. It is the official Xiph.org encoder (the one you get from vorbis.com). Our member here, Garf, did his own tunings, based on version 1.0 to produce GT3b1 and GT3b2. Both show improved pre-echo handling for q values of 5 to 10. It was judged that GT3b1 was the better of the two. There was a minor bugfix update earlier this year in March which only appeared on the CVS at Xiph.org. They consisted of very minor bug fixes which do more to correct odd problems that may occur rather than improving quality. This was referred to as Post 1.0 CVS. Quality problems that mainly affected low bitrates were addressed in a new bugfix (1.0.1) that was released.

Post 1.0.1 CVS was released late December 2003 by Monty at Xiph, and includes true CBR. In order to simplify the situation where we had two encoders (1.0.1 and GT3b1), John33 merged the sources to give us GT3b2. From the Vorbis listening test and the recent 128 kbps multiformat test, Aoyumi's aoTuV Vorbis tuning was determined to be the best Vorbis encoder. After the success of aoTuV beta 2 in the listening test, Xiph.Org has merged the tunings into the official branch to produce the long-awaited Vorbis 1.1.

Recommended Vorbis Encoders

(adapted from Recommended Encoder and Settings post compiled by QuantumKnot)

Windows Binaries:

John33's oggenc2.8 is a special version of the Ogg Vorbis encoder. "Features include compression from lossless files (Monkeys Audio, LPAC, FLAC, OptimFROG, WavPack and Shorten - requires presence of decoders), and the ability to specify 'padding' in the headers for subsequent insertion of Tags." (from Ogg Vorbis page at rarewares)

(work in progress, guide will be completed soon)