The Ogg Vorbis CODEC project

June 22, 2000

Ogg Vorbis is a fully Open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.

Vorbis is the first of a planned family of Ogg multimedia coding formats being developed as part of Xiphophorus's Ogg multimedia project.

Vorbis Home Table of Contents

News

Vorbis 1.0 beta launched at the MP3 summit on June 20, 2000. The iCast sponsored demo site at http://www.vorbis.com/ now offers binary downloads of encoders and plugins for Linux and Windows (and links to others like Be will be there soon if not already), audio tracks in .ogg format and other goodies. The beta launch is not entirely complete; we still have quite a few tracks (and a few complete albums) to get up on the site, as well as several encoder features that didn't quite make it in by the 20th.

State of Vorbis

The current state of the Vorbis software library and tools:

libvorbis

libVorbis is the core Ogg stream / Vorbis engine.
Status: Beta release.

vorbisfile

vorbisfile is an ANSI C convenience library intended to simplify most applications and provide example code for functions such as seeking and error recovery.
Status: Beta release.

code examples

example code that illustrates a simple encoder, decoder and file structure extractor.
Status: Beta release.

command line tool

stock command line utility for full-featured encoding, decoding and playback on most platforms.
Status: In progress

player plugins

plugins that provide Vorbis playback in popular media players

XMMS plugin: Beta release (only streaming missing)
Winamp plugin: Beta release (only streaming missing)
Sonique plugin: Beta release (only streaming missing)
CL-AMP (BeOS) plugin: Complete (but perhaps not up to date with current CVS). See bebits.com for details.
Freeamp plugin: Beta Release

documentation

Documents covering the complete Vorbis specification as well as the programming APIs for xiph.org's own libvorbis/vorbisfile.
Status: In progress

Distribution Terms in Plain English

Anyone may freely use and distribute the OggSquish and Vorbis specification, whether in a private, public or corporate capacity. The specification is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose. However, Xiphophorus and the Ogg project (xiph.org) reserve the right to set the Ogg/Vorbis specification and certify specification compliance.

Xiphophorus's Vorbis software libraries (libvorbis and vorbisfile) are distributed under the (GNU) Lesser/Library General Public License (LGPL); these libraries may be linked by any application, Open or proprietary. However, any and all modifications made to the library source by any entity must be released back to the public under the LGPL. Proprietary projects may link the library, but may not incorporate LGPL code directly.

All other portions of xiph.org's reference Vorbis software are distributed under the (GNU) General Public License (GPL).

Because the specification is open, third parties are welcome (and encouraged) to implement third party Vorbis software under other licenses using xiph.org's reference source as an authoritative reference.

OggSQUISH, Ogg Vorbis, Xiphophorus, the Xiphophorus Fish Logo, the Thor-and-the-Snake logo and the Laser-Playback-Head-of-Omniscience logo are trademarks (tm) of Xiphophorus. These pages are copyright (C) 1994-2000 Xiphophorus. All rights reserved.

Comments and questions about this web site are welcome.