August 01, 2008 Archives

Fri Aug 1 12:25:15 EDT 2008

Mozilla Summit: The Rise of Ogg

Every *nix user out there knows about the Ogg Vorbis and Theora media formats, which come standard on *nix. Ever since the creation of these formats, other than on *nix distributions Ogg hasn't gotten any serious traction in the marketplace. Until now...

I just discovered via Groklaw that the latest nightly builds of Firefox have implemented native support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora, on all platforms. Remember when Firefox first hit the scene, as the first major browser with tabs? That caused Microsoft and others to get off their butts and get tabs too. Now what's going to happen when this hits the next stable version of Firefox? There's going to be a rush to support this "new" media format, to not get left behind.

Remember when the W3C initially wanted to put Ogg as the default media format in HTML5, but backed off after Nokia actually had the stones to claim Ogg was proprietary and MP3 wasn't? Mozilla is going to demonstrate how boneheadedly wrong that statement is, and make the W3C look like idiots for believing a phone maker.

And coincidentally, on the Second Life forums it was disclosed that the next version of the viewer(1.21) will finally have Ogg Vorbis streaming as parcel media. So that makes two major products that support a free software media format. Let the Rise of Ogg begin.

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