Comment by otterley
3 months ago
This argument goes back to the 1990s with the MP3 format (which was patent encumbered at the time). There was an attempt to adopt an unencumbered competitor called Ogg Vorbis, but it never got any traction.
3 months ago
This argument goes back to the 1990s with the MP3 format (which was patent encumbered at the time). There was an attempt to adopt an unencumbered competitor called Ogg Vorbis, but it never got any traction.
I don't know why. It's pretty much the same argument we're seeing now with JPEG XL. Ogg works perfectly fine & is a completely servicable audio codec, but browsers just took it out of their supported codecs and devices like iPods didn't support it for whatever reason, so "normies" (to use the parlance) weren't aware of it and just went with MP3 for anything and everything.
I'm sure there's some story behind why that happened...
One word: Napster.
The p2p audio piracy portion of Napster was shut down by 2001. The other common p2p sharing platforms like Kazaa, gnutella, et al. mostly supported any type of audio format (at least from what I can remember). People wanted mp3 because in their mind, mp3 == music. The hardware devices like iPod & Zune mostly had support only for formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF (I asked ai this, so take that for what it's worth).
Anyway, it's just another example of hardware mfgs not supporting open formats, so we don't need to get too deep in the weeds trying to remember history.
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Less traction than MP3, sure, but “never got any traction” is pushing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis#Usage
It got traction with Spotify and pretty much anyone who wasn't locked in via overlapping codecs licence requirements or network effects.