The inventor of the Ogg container format, Monty “xiphmont” Montgomery, has written up a remarkably detailed article refuting every complaint Mans Rullgard has posed in his anti-Ogg articles. “Mans Rullgard has written two long rants about the Ogg container in the past few years. One made it to Slashdot [and OSNews] apparently based on the drama potential alone. If you don’t know what I’m talking about below, don’t worry about it, tl;dr. I’d not originally intended to respond to open trolling. The continued urging of many individuals has convinced me it’s important to rebut in some public form. Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact.”
A great post. And like the other one on openness, it shows that an advantage of open systems is that claims can be verified independently. You don’t have to believe marketing brochures.
No there isn’t. The original critique was rubbish. Too much comparing Ogg to specific different formats, be it Matroska, MP4 or ASF, interchangeably for no good reason other than to make Ogg look equally bad next to all of them.
The original critique was indeed rubbish.
Nitpick: suggested re-phrasing: “for no good reason other than to try make Ogg look bad”
My take: The conclusion above was pretty self-evident from the original rant, even without the comprehensive rebuttal from Monty of Xiph.org.
PS: Another observation: These made-up “objections” to Theora and Ogg seem to be becoming increasingly: shrill, illogical, hysterical, vocal, loud and frequent. Someone, somewhere is clearly pushing an agenda.
Edited 2010-04-28 00:33 UTC
I don’t know, people fear change. And the are a lot of stupid people who think that FOSS equals communism.
FOSS equals collaborative effort, I suppose, but I would contend that communism doesn’t. Systems of Communism imply a planned economy, with decisions made by a supreme authority, which are features totally lacking in FOSS, and actually are more reminiscent of commercial software developemnt.
If I were to pick a economic system that was closest to FOSS, I would perhaps nominate either “barter” or “scientific research” as the closest models.
Neither of those models are new (in fact they are both thousands of years old, and barter is even older that capitalism), so they don’t really represent change at all. They just focus on the trading of effort directly between individuals to their mutual self-interest and benefit, and they leave control and rip-off by big business out of the picture entirely.
Edited 2010-04-28 01:59 UTC
Also, “co-operative” is reasonably close as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
The only real difference between FOSS and a co-operative is that a co-operative seeks to take a profit from people who are not in the co-operative, whereas FOSS typically doesn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_cooperative
PS: I suggest that FOSS == “non-profit co-operative” or “consumer’s co-operative”. Pretty close. Food for thought, anyway.
Edited 2010-04-28 02:34 UTC
I’d suggest that FOSS == software development and distribution model and communism == politics crap I’m not even interested in. But that’s just me.
Communism, capitalism and socialism are all economic systems.
Republic, democracy, fascism etc. – those are political systems.
I wish public school was able to drive the distinction home more effectively. Most of my countrymen in the US think our form of government (our political system) is capitalism.
*sigh*
Exactly correct.
‘Licensed, copyrighted, proprietary software’ and ‘copyleft, consumer co-operative FOSS software’ are not politcal systems or even economic systems, they are in fact both free enterprise business models.
So? The fact that FOSS software is produced via a free enterprise business model that is just as viable, and just as venerable as the business model for proprietary software does not stop some high-profile people from attacking FOSS software by trying to characterise it as being “communist”, “hippie” or “a cancer”.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communi…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/
PS: All of this is not really on topic, except for the fact that Ogg/Theora is FOSS software, developed via a consumer co-operative busniess model, and this thread is all about defending public reputations in the face of totally unjustified rabid criticism coming from competing commercial self-interested parties.
Edited 2010-04-28 23:21 UTC
Considering the vast sums of money that go into lobbying and campaign coffers, it’s not that far off to say that the US political system is capitalism.
Also, english isn’t my native tongue and as I said, I just couldn’t care less about the topic.
Every political system governs an economic system. The players can and do use their economic gains to influence the political system. That is a constant – the two systems are connect, but they are not the same.
Clearly, but they are connected. Political freedom is partly dependent on economic freedom. It’s not uncommon for tyranical governments to also control the markets; equally, societies with liberal governments usually have (comparatively/mostly) free markets. That’s why people don’t bother to much with the distinction between republican or democratic governments and a capitalist economy, or a socialist government and a centrally-planned economy or collectivist model of ownership.
I understand the difference full-well, and I suspect that most of us ignorant A’murracans do as well. It’s just that the two are so closely related that, in many cases, you can gloss over the separation and not loose much significant information.
I get an impression recently that most Americans think (and worry) they’ve gone Socialist
Every modern Western democracy uses a mixed economic system. That is, parts are completely government run, like the military – and authoritarian. Other parts are completely unregulated capitalism – most emerging markets – parts where the government hasn’t been asked to step in yet. Most are regulated/managed to some degree, and differently depending on the needs of the specific industries – Airlines need different rules and oversight than doctors or UFC, for example.
Most parts of the economy have some level of “management” by the government even if we don’t call it that. In the US the “socialism” litmus test seems to be whether those rules and enforcement (or lack thereof) benefit everyone or just the wealthy. If it benefits everyone, it must be socialism. If it only benefits WallStreet – that’s capitalism.
Thom/Admins,
why was this completely reasonable comment voted down?
Can you have a peek?
Surely, those where the only concerns that where ever expressed: “I am ediot, I unlike Theora,” and “Oh JESUS! Change! NOOOO!” I mean, it is completely self-evident that there are no valid objections or concerns about Ogg Theora as a format.
I’m still waiting on that rigorous, verifiable and reproducable quality comparison (on the same, high quality source input, Lemur!).
Not that I’m opposed to Theora, mind! I just don’t think you’re giving credit to the handful of legitimate objections that have come up.
Agree on the criticism of the original. The original article confused me at the point where it said Ogg was inferior because it had infinite possible “mappings” of data within the container…
Rullgard’s original article made it sound like there were infinite possible mappings, as if the Ogg container didn’t really describe what it contained in any kind of systematic fashion. In my mind, that’s the purpose of a container, so I was a bit amazed that Ogg wouldn’t do that.
As for the rest of the analysis, I admit I fell for it, but I won’t blame myself for that because of the blatant misrepresentations Rullgard used in the original article. Hell, if Monty is right, Rullgard’s article is downright fraudulent.
Basically, not only did Rullgard use meaningless comparisons, he cherry-picked his data or outright lied about the results of tests. Rullgard either only compared Ogg to the few codecs that performed better IN THAT PARTICULAR AREA (ignoring others that did worse), or he only presented numbers for Ogg and claimed the other containers were superior when they aren’t all that much better. I recently had to sit through a stupid online course on ethics in research, and this debacle reads like one of their textbook examples.
I’m inclined to believe Monty because he gave actual numbers and his explanations of the things I DO understand make much more sense. He could still be gaming the system by using inefficient programs to generate mp4 or MPEG-TS files or doing useless comparisons, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to say more on the issue. We do still have to rely on Monty and Mans Rullgard for subjective opinions on what is “excessive” or not…
As to lemur2 below, I’d normally do that, but Monty is potentially biased toward what he admits is his own brainchild…
Edited 2010-04-28 02:09 UTC
When you are faced with a situation like this, the best approach is to “follow the money”.
Ask yourself: How does Monty’s interest in this benefit if his position is actually lying? How does Rullgard’s interest benefit if he is lying?
Or, to put it another way: which side is asking for your money (e.g. royalties), and which isn’t?
This is a very quick and easy way to sort out which is what.
Edited 2010-04-28 01:58 UTC
We recently went through our quarterly ethics training where I work, too, although it was for the whole university system, and not just the research arm. And yes, it was extremely boring and highly self-evident. (Wow, you mean I shouldn’t use university money to buy myself stuff? I would never have known if they hadn’t told me!)
Part of what aggravates me about tall this is how people are almost pointedly and deliberately not doing any kind of testing. If one person would take the time to smack together an exhaustive test matrix (and release and detail it!), then we could almost-conclusively settle this whole damned debate. Instead, one partisan player or another keeps cropping up and shouting out their personal point of view.
Edited 2010-04-29 17:42 UTC
Well, alot of these “objections” seem to come from people involved with the x264 project. And since they are currently contacting all contributors in order to change the licence to allow offering a proprietary version for money I guess there is a monetary incentive for them to tout the superiority of x264 against theora. In this case however it was an attack at the container rather than the codec. Also I don’t know if Mans Rullgard is involved with the x264 project in any way.
http://www.windows7download.com/win7-x264-video-codec-64bit-/xjscqt…
Good guess.
While I have no objection to people charging for their work, and in the case of x264 there is perhaps a good commercial market to be persued in digital TV transmitters and Blueray encoders, x264 authors would also have a huge pecuniary incentive to try to convince the world to entirely overlook the requirement for public-access web standards to be royalty-free.
h.264 simply has no place as the codec for the web.
Edited 2010-04-28 05:25 UTC
And thus, the only logical step is for someone to create a ‘fiendishly complex mapping’ to stick x264-encoded video into the Ogg container format and BLOW THEIR MINDS
To what purpose? x264 is totally unsuitable for use as the video codec standard for the web, because unlike all other web standards it won’t meet the requirement of being royalty-free.
I can see no clear incentive to embed x264 video in an Ogg wrapper.
No! Some things Man was not meant to do! You’re playing God!
Hmmm… this is looking more an more like an organized smear campain by the x264 devs against ogg/theora. Synched with them trying to offer a proprietary version which they can sell, if this is the case then it’s pretty crappy in my opinion.
Thanks for making things cristal clear!
There are agendas on both sides, like the idea that the only thing that matters about a piece of software is its license.
Hardly. Opera is a closed-source proprietary browser that is fully compliant with open standards web, including the HTML5/Theora video & codec proposed standard for the web. Firefox and Google Chrome are open source browser that likewise are compliant with the open standards for the web (in the case of Firefox, slightly less compliant than Opera or Chrome, but the point still holds).
The isssue is NOT with the license of the software embodying web standards, the issue is that for use on the web, the standards themselves embodied in the software must be royalty-free to implement.
Shame is probably what Mr Rullgard should be feeling.
I didn’t get all of Monty’s tech talk but I clearly see that something was very wrong in the original critique.
The epitome of “mauvaise foi”.