Re: [Advocate Play Ogg] Getting Ogg decoding on all PC apps

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

On 3/29/08, Jon T <address@hidden> wrote:
> I really love Ogg. Ogg is my audio codec for almost all of my listening and
> I also use Flac as a audio codec for archiving my audio and will use it at
> times on my PC.

That's good to know.

> The issue is wanting to make it very simple for others to provide their PCs
> with Ogg decoding that can have whatever Windows audio/multimedia that they
> are using. Is it possible ?

More or less.  For Windows users, you can point them to the DirectShow
filters[1].  Every other DS application (like WMP and some video
editors and whatnot) will then be able to interact with the common Ogg
types (Vorbis, Theora, etc).  On OS X you can tell users to install
the QuickTime component[2] that will pretty much make Ogg work across
most OS X applications.

> I guess I can send them a open source player with the appropriate
> codecs to use, but I would like to

You can also do this, but most users do not like to change their own
players.  I'd say to avoid it unless there's no other way.  Which
there is.

Finally, in a year or so most browsers will be playing Ogg files
natively, so this problem pretty much goes away.

> PLEASE don't purchase portable multi-media/mp3 players
> that DON'T support the superior open source codecs like Ogg (Flac and
> Monkey's Audio are cool as well).

Yes, indeed.  You can help making people realize the error of their
ways (hur hur hur) by pointing them to campaigns like Spread Open
Media[3] and PlayOgg here.

Thanks for your support.

-Ivo

[1] http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
[2] http://xiph.org/quicktime/
[3] http://spreadopenmedia.org