Re: [Advocate Play Ogg] Separate website?

[Guy Johnston]

Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>> Also, Xiph does seem to appreciate the initiative
>> (http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/05/playogg).
> 
> I don't think that's the case. The feeling I got from the Xiph
> community was that we're happy to have more exposure. There are just a
> few weird things about the playogg initiative:
> 
> * it's weird to see an address@hidden mailing list when there's
> already an address@hidden mailing list.
> * why is it vorbis-focused and doesn't include speex, flac, theora, or
> dirac?
> * why does it have such a strong vlc focus when there's other software
> that supports Ogg Vorbis, too?
> * why is xiph only mentioned in passing and not as the core
> organisation to address wrt Vorbis? (the recent changes of wording are
> good, btw :)
> 
> But generally, Xiph is very happy to have organisations like the fsf
> push open formats. Archive.org, Wikipedia and Mozilla are other
> organisations that have caught on by now. The more people talk about
> open codecs, the better - we all want a free-er world.
> 
> Silvia.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Advocate mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/advocate
> 

I think the reason it's focused on Vorbis is because MP3 is seen as a sort of 
standard for audio
distribution by a lot of people, and the FSF want to counter that as it's 
patent-encumbered. Most
people don't usually use lossless formats such as FLAC, and speech compression 
formats such as
Speex. Mentioning Theora might be a good idea though.

I think the reason they only mention VLC is that they don't want to promote 
proprietary software,
and that's one of the only free (as in freedom) media players that works well 
on Windows and OS X,
is easy to install on them, and works with the Xiph codecs. There isn't 
anything about software for
GNU/Linux users because they're assuming they already have the right software 
to play Ogg Vorbis files.

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