Vorbis

Ogg Vorbis is a completely free and open audio compression (codec) project from Xiphophorous, and is part of the Ogg Open multimedia project. Like everything in the Ogg project, Vorbis is completely free of licensing or patent issues raised by other proprietary formats such as MP3.

Vorbis is currently being tuned before a final release, but the specification has been finalised. The current encoder will produce output from 64kpbs to 350kpbs, although these numbers are only approximate, as Vorbis is inherently variable bitrate (VBR?). Quality is currently on a par with LAME, the best MP3 encoder, at medium bitrates, and on a par with MP3Pro? at lower bitrates.

The specifications are public domain, the libraries are BSD-licensed, and the tools are GPL'd.

The BBC is currently (November 2001) putting out experimental Vorbis-encoded audio streams. See below for more details.

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More info

• The Xiphophorous site
  • http://www.xiph.org
• The Vorbis site
  • http://www.vorbis.com
  • [Vorbis FAQ]
  • [Vorbis Documentation]

• [BBC Vorbis testing page]

/Talk