[whatwg] codecs and containers

[Conrad Parker]

On 11/12/2007, James Justin Harrell <herorev at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I've heard several times that Ogg is hard coded to only work with certain types of codecs, and
> thus can't work with new codecs without being updated first. Is that also incorrect?

Yes, that is also incorrect. The Ogg container has been used with many
different codecs without modification of RFC3533. For a while it was
even used as a replacement for AVI to provide streaming for pirated
movies in whatever proprietary codecs the pirates chose to use. They
called this OGM, but the container was unmodified Ogg.

Nowadays Ogg is primarily used for free codecs such as Theora, Vorbis,
Speex, FLAC, to encode freely available (Creative Commons etc.)
content.

> I'm surprised to hear that Ogg supports DRM. Nokia made a fuss recently about the W3C supporting
> Ogg, and many seemed to think it was because of Ogg not supporting DRM.
> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/2045200

Ralph Giles responed to this pretty well:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nokia-to-w3c-ogg-is.html#comment-90743

In any case, whatever DRM scheme the W3C chooses for web text would
map well into Ogg video; the Ogg Skeleton track headers map directly
to HTTP response headers, allowing per-track Transfer-Encoding etc.

cheers,

Conrad.