MP3 watch out, here comes VP3
Why a German lab could spoil the MP3 party. By Peter Rojas
Thursday August 22, 2002
The Guardian
Would the internet have ever caught on if every time anyone wanted to post a web page or distribute a web browser a royalty had to be paid? If HTML hadn't been freely available, the internet almost certainly wouldn't have grown as quickly as it has.
But unlike HTML, there aren't any standards for audio and video on the internet, just a bunch of competing formats. All of the compression techniques, or codecs, used to shrink audio and video files so they can be shared over the internet are each owned by a different company. The leading formats for online audio and video - Microsoft's Windows Media, Apple's QuickTime, and RealNetworks' RealMedia, DivX Networks' DivX, and Fraunhofer Institute's MP3 - are patented and require some kind of licensing fee for their use. That is, until recently.
With the release of the oddly named Ogg Vorbis, there is now an alternative. The product of a loose amalgamation of programmers, led by Chris "Monty" Montgomery, and working under the aegis of the non-profit Xiph.Org Foundation, Vorbis, as it's known, is a new format for compressing audio that is royalty-free and available for anyone to use without licensing fees or restrictions. The hope is to create standards for audio and video on the internet that belong to no one and are controlled by no one. Xiph.Org is already at work on VP3, another free and open format for compressing video.
While this may not seem like such a big deal, in actuality, whoever controls the codecs for audio and video on the web actually wields a tremendous amount of power over how music and movies will be distributed. Hollywood and the recording industry are clamouring for a crackdown on the sharing of music and movies online. Mindful of this, Microsoft has been pushing the entertainment industry to adopt its Windows Media format, which has built-in security features that could potentially restrict computer users from swapping files over the web. Microsoft would love to be the only place that the industry could turn to in order to securely distribute music and movies over the internet.
While it's still to early to tell whether Vorbis will emerge as a viable alternative to Windows Media and RealMedia for broadcasting over the web, it does pose a more immediate challenge to the current status of MP3 as the format of choice for digital audio files. Few people realise that MP3 is the intellectual property of a German research lab that invented the algorithm for compressing audio back in 1991. The Fraunhofer Institute holds the patent for MP3, which it did not enforce, allowing MP3 to become established as the de facto standard in the interim.
Fraunhofer decided in 1998 to collect royalties, and now requires software and hardware manufacturers to pay fees for each player or recorder sold or given away, and 2% of revenues for the distribution of MP3s online. They are asking even more for MP3Pro, the higher fidelity format it recently introduced. While those fees might not sound like much, with the price of MP3 players plummeting, a $5 licensing fee may soon be greater than the players cost to manufacture, preventing prices from dropping any further.
Because Vorbis matches or exceeds MP3 in terms of sonic fidelity, in theory it should prove an attractive alternative, since there are no licensing costs associated with its use. So should you ditch your MP3 player and your collection of MP3 files and start over with Vorbis? Not quite.
The upstart format is a long way from displacing MP3, which has millions of users now and, as the de facto standard for file-trading and portable digital audio players, is deeply entrenched in the popular mindset as the format for digital audio online. MP3 and Vorbis aren't mutually exclusive as formats. With a simple software upgrade, your MP3 player could easily play your Vorbis files, allowing collections of both files to easily co-exist.
You can find people sharing songs encoded with Vorbis on peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella and KaZaA, and Vorbis.com has links to downloads of Vorbis-enabled software players.
RealNetworks, the company behind Real Player, has recently taken steps to incorporate Vorbis into its audio playback software, and WinAmp, the world's most popular MP3 software, supports the new format.
There are already some hardware players that support Vorbis, such as MP Sharp's Digital Jukebox. Some video game publishers have begun using Vorbis as the audio format for their games (Fraunhofer charges $2,500 for game publishers to use MP3), and the BBC is testing the use of streaming Vorbis for online webcasts of The Archers and other programming.
In the long run, even if Vorbis and VP3 fail to emerge as the formats of choice, it probably won't matter. Rather, the true significance of the effort of this group of volunteers to create free and open standards for online audio and video may be the dashing of Microsoft's, or any other corporation's, dreams of a multimedia monopoly.
