Unhelpful

Ogg Vorbis is evil. The fact that it’s evil by accident doesn’t make it less evil. The fact that it was actually designed not to be evil also does not make it less evil. The path to SDMI is paved with good intentions and good formats.

Ogg Vorbis is a solution desperately in search of a problem.

One of the primary benefits of Ogg Vorbis is that it’s free. How big a benefit is this, and to who? Sure, software patents are evil, and MP3 is saddled with a few relevent patents, but since they’re not actively pursued, getting upset about MP3 patents is about as useful in the digital world as, say, screaming at Unisys for owning the patents to LZH compression, and along with Chicken Little, claiming that the sky is falling, that we’ll have to burn all our gifs, and adopt some “open” format that every browser supports incompletely and differently. Oh wait, we already did that - burnallgifs.org.

Back in the real world, you and I have to realize that the net is driven by content. Content, for the most part and generally excluding what you create and some of what I create and consume, is driven not by people with a full awareness of most of the technical or legal issues, but by people with no clue how or why technology works, who don’t find themselves worse off for it, and still plan on consuming content anyway. The good thing is that we’re all the better for it. If the internet were restricted to programmers and corporate MIS departments, universities and government agencies, it’d be in the position where HAM radio is today - the best medium to discuss HAM radio. The internet started with that model in mind, and slowly moved away from it to the situation we have today - porn popups on every mistyped domain name, every domain name spammer masquerading as a content portal, and every episode of Buffy ever made ready for download. And again, thank goodness, because without an overload of people devouring content as opposed to creating it, bandwidth would be as crippled as it was in the 70’s internet or the 80’s BBS scene. Cable modems and DSL (and the T1s, T3s and OC3 that serve content to them) are a direct result of people devouring content at gluttonous speeds.

MP3s gained popularity because they were the best solution at the time for turning songs off of CDs into just-barely-practical filesizes. Napster gave that trend a welcome kick in the pants, and pretty soon, there are as many people using MP3s that don’t know what ‘MP3′ stands for as don’t know what ‘HTTP’ or ‘WWW’ stand for. Market saturation equals success in this case like so many others.

Now, we have many evil formats to encode digital music in, and those gigantic MP3 files are approaching being trivial in size as broadband becomes the norm even for the basic user. We have Real Media files, AAC files, a dozen other proprietary files that I don’t even care to research because I’m not saddled with them, and we have Ogg Motherfucking Vorbis.

The technically savvy try to sell Ogg Vorbis to the casual user on the basis that the sound quality is better. It’s so much better, in fact, that in a room of 100 people on $5,000 worth of audio equipment, maybe half of them can tell the difference between a highest quality Ogg Vorbis file and an MP3 file of comparable bit rate. Big win there. Ultimately, the Ogg Vorbis proponent sees a world where Ogg Vorbis matures into the commonly accepted format. Big win there, too. The market fragments into various factions, and now instead of searching by artist name, you go into your p2p software and have to worry about what flavor it’s in, too. All for what, a marginal increase in audio quality that could be duplicated by setting the MP3 encoding up to the next bitrate? Great work! But this is trivial.

What is not trivial is the fact that we have the lurking shadow of Digital Rights Management and SDMI-enabled encoding. I realize that Ogg Vorbis is free of these. So is MP3, though any official successor formats to it won’t be. That is, in fact, the problem: all new industry standards are going to be DRM/SDMI dehanced, no questions asked. So while we lure away users from the MP3 format to Ogg Vorbis because of a sexy 0.5% increase in audio quality in the 20,000-25,000 Hz spectrum, we get them used to a very benign concept that is in fact very, very dangerous: Flavor of the Week. If Ogg Vorbis, to the casual user, is better than MP3 192 Kbit because you can more successfully encode the sounds of a dog whistle with it, then maybe AAC2 or MP4 or Sony SureTrac6 is even better than Ogg, because it can produce more accurate representations of the “brown sound” spectrum field of ~7-10 Hz, and then we’ve got a habit of switching formats based on percieved quality benefits. This habit will surely lead us down the path of DRM by foisting on the typical user, who doesn’t know what rights management even means, a great sounding format that’s completely free to use, just like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis…

…until the SDMI-compliant DRM is enabled after-the-fact with a date-sensitive algorithm. Now not only are our audio file collections effectively Balkanized, now they’re castrated as well because all the files we didn’t encode from our own computer are magically non-functional via some sleeper code. Education is key here, but who’s easier to educate: ten million audio users who just want something to work, or ten thousand audio file creators, band members, content providers, software developers, and digital transmission junkies? Call me a cynic, but I’m going with the latter.

That’s why I encode in the MP3 format in 192Kbit, and if I ever accumulate $5,000 worth of audio equipment, then I guess I’ll just overcompensate by encoding at 320Kbit. But keep your dirty hippy Ogg Vorbis away from me, my software, and my distribution networks.

You’ll thank me later.

(Note: This is the 2004 club remix of the original 1999 hit!)