[playogg-discuss] Hardware that supports Ogg Vorbis

[smc+playogg]

> I'm guessing that this mailing list isn't real active? Do you know how
> active the Play-ogg campaign is? I'm just curious what the current
> activity level is and how everyone is working toward right now.

It's effectively dead. The FSF put up a page at "playfreedom.org" just about 2 
years
ago that was supposedly going to be a followup/replacement campaign, but nothing
was ever done with it. They seem to be a lot more "anti-restriction" than 
really being
"pro-freedom" as far as this goes. (I actually directly asked John Sullivan 
about the playogg/playfreedom
campaigns at Northeast Linux Fest. The response was [in my own slightly-bitter 
paraphrasing here] 
more or less that they sort of want to come back to it someday but they're too 
focussed on
yelling at Apple and Microsoft right now and aren't sure when they'll have time 
for anything else.)

More to your original question - Ogg Vorbis support overall is actually pretty 
widespread,
but abysmally unadvertised. Many devices that actually support it don't even 
mention it
anywhere (e.g. lots of Android-based devices.  ALL Android devices support Ogg 
Vorbis
audio for example, but a lot of them only mention mp3, aac, wma, etc. in their 
specifications.)

I'm not sure about head unit support overall, though I know there was at least 
one company
making them quite a few years ago so they're likely to be out there. 
Personally, I'd prefer
to stick with an extremely basic unit with an auxiliary input, and just plug in 
my phone or
other Vorbis (or Opus, now)-capable player, which I can then take with me 
easily and use 
when I leave the car.

As far as I know, pretty much every media-playing device made by Sandisk or 
Samsung over the
last half-decade or so supports Ogg Vorbis, along with quite a few other 
companies that
aren't Microsoft or Apple. (Apple MAY support Opus in future devices, since 
Opus support
is "Mandatory to Implement" for the WebRTC standard. Microsoft PROBABLY 
actually will eventually support it - they were part of the committee that 
signed off on it. Microsoft does have some ongoing argument with WebRTC, but 
the Opus codec doesn't seem to be part of that argument.)

(If you're interested, I had a "pro-free-media" episode at Hacker Public Radio 
up last year, which
included some discussion about how widespread Ogg Vorbis support actually is 
despite its low profile.
http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1103 )